Sam Bankman-Fried’s $16 billion assets have plummeted drastically in days – What is his current net worth?
Sam Bankman-Fried was once one of the richest people in crypto, in fact, he made it among the top 20 cryptocurrency billionaires and also the wealthiest young people in the world, thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm.
But his empire came crashing down amid a solvency crisis in November 2022 – leaving him millions out of pocket.
Who is Sam Bankman-Fried?
Sam was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics, and from an early age was considered a high achiever.
After studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began his professional career as a trader at Jane Street Capital where he specialized in arbitrage trading strategies.
He reportedly worked at the company for three years before stumbling across cryptocurrency for the first time in 2017.
According to Forbes, Sam saw scope for the use of arbitrage techniques in crypto and began by focusing on trading in the Japanese market.
He then launched FTX in 2019 and grew it into one of the leading exchanges for buying and selling crypto derivatives including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other popular digital currencies.
In early 2022, investors valued FTX and its US operations at a combined $40billion.
At its peak, the trading platform had well over one million users.
What is Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth?
Most of Sam’s wealth was tied up in ownership of about half of Bahamas-based FTX and a share of its FTT tokens.
According to Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried’s net worth peaked at $26billion.
On November 7, 2022, his net worth was estimated at $16 billion.
But by November 8, 2022, amid FTX’s solvency crisis, his net worth was estimated to have dropped 94% in a day to $991.5million – making it one of the largest one-day drops in the index’s history.
As of November 14, 2022, his net worth is now closer to zero.
How much money did Sam Bankman-Fried lose?
Following the collapse, Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.
The outlet described it as “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth”.
On November 10, 2022, just two days after the collapse, the entire staff of the FTX Future Fund publicly quit.
In a statement, the five-person team wrote that they “have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund”.
A day later, Bankman-Fried issued a series of statements on Twitter amid reports that he was being investigated by the Bahamas Police.
He wrote: “I’m really sorry, again, that we ended up here. Hopefully, things can find a way to recover.
“I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did.”
