Meet the youngest billionaire in the world – what is Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth and how did the CEO found crypto exchange FTX in Hong Kong before age 30?
- With a net worth of US$22.5 billion, the founder of futures exchange FTX is the youngest person on the 2021 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest people in the world
- Bankman-Fried donated over US$5 million to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign against Donald Trump – but regrets not getting in on his friend’s bitcoin project in 2013
Currently worth US$22.5 billion thanks to FTX, a Hong-Kong based futures exchange he founded that allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, Bankman-Fried plans to donate most of his wealth to causes and organizations he supports.
So how did he build his wealth, and what made him decide to give back?
His parents are both Stanford law professors, but he disliked school
Bankman-Fried was born to Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, two professors from Stanford Law School in the US. His mother teaches law, economics, and philosophy, while his father teaches tax policy.
Despite growing up in a household run by educators, Bankman-Fried hated school. Yahoo! Finance reports that he once said: “I have a lot of pedagogical disagreements with how a school is run.”
At around seventh or eighth grade, he admitted to his mother that he found school so boring that he was “gonna die”, according to the same source. His parents then arranged for him to join maths camps for the summer, which honed his problem-solving and managerial skills.
He went to MIT and became president of Epsilon Theta
After high school, Bankman-Fried decided to get a degree in physics at MIT – a decision that Business Insider reports was decided by a flip of a coin, with Caltech as the other option.
There, he joined a group house called Epsilon Theta, where he would stay up all night playing games with friends. Adam Yedida, a member of Epsilon Theta, told Yahoo! Finance that the group was similar to “a fraternity, but replace all the alcohol with the nerdiest stuff you can imagine”.