Author: Business Insider
Original compilation: TechFlow Friends
At 29, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is the only other person besides Mark Zuckerberg to get rich so quickly.
After months of talking to Sam Bankman-Fried's closest friends, family and colleagues, we've learned 10 of the most surprising things about Sam Bankman-Fried, who became a billionaire at 29 because of cryptocurrency And little known facts.
Over four years, Sam Bankman-Fried has amassed a net worth of $26.5 billion and built a cryptocurrency empire.
Here are 10 of the most surprising and little-known factual conclusions we've learned.
At 29, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is the only other person besides Mark Zuckerberg to get rich so quickly.
His road to riches came from exploiting arbitrage opportunities between Western and Asian cryptocurrency exchanges, culminating in a 10% daily million-dollar trading gain for his cryptocurrency trader Alameda Research in 2018.
While executing arbitrage trading, he also saw an opportunity to improve the existing "shitshow exchange" and launched a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX.
According to CoinGecko’s data, the exchange has developed from a flat business situation three years ago to the present. In just two years, it has achieved a good result of ranking sixth in spot trading and second in derivatives trading. .
In just four short years, Bankman-Fried built a cryptocurrency empire at breakneck speed while accumulating a net worth of $26.5 billion, according to Forbes' assessment as of Dec. 13. He has taken the tough regulatory scrutiny in his stride and made it through the final stretch, but his competitors have not.
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1. Bankman-Fried's favorite food is salted french fries
Bankman-Fried is a vegetarian out of animal welfare concerns. One of his friends and former colleagues, Alameda's former COO Andrew Croghan, shared how Bankman-Fried adapted to the diet while working in Hong Kong.
“He has an incredibly sensitive palate. His favorite foods are very everyday foods,” Croghan said, before adding: “He said that putting seasoning or spices on things like that was like putting a bunch of Salt. He won't eat anything with a little pepper on it."
Bankman-Fried's sensibilities have sometimes presented him with a challenge, as East Asian cuisine is often less focused on the concept of "vegan eating" and is often notoriously spicy. So his food of choice is usually french fries.
"For him, the best meal in the world is plain French fries with some light salt," Croghan said.
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2. The video of Bankman-Fried dancing going viral on TikTok wasn’t a deliberate fake
In addition to his simple diet, Bankman-Fried also has a simple wardrobe, most commonly a loose hoodie with the FTX logo on it.
“He didn’t spend a penny on his clothes,” said Sam Trabucco, co-CEO of Alameda Research and an MIT classmate of Bankman-Fried’s.
In a Bankman-Fried dancing video that went viral on TikTok, he responded to questions about packing all of his clothes in a backpack and talking about his minimalist wardrobe.
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3. He can sit and play multiple board games at once and thinks sitting is a lot of fun
Bankman-Fried and his younger brother Gabe enjoy intellectual challenges from games such as Magic: The Gathering, bridge, and chess. But for Sam, sometimes it's not enough to play one type of mind game at a time.
"In terms of growing up playing games, his attitude was, if a board game is fun, you should use a timer to count the time and play both games at the same time," Gabe Bankman-Fried told Insider.
At one point, Sam organized a group of high school students to participate in a jigsaw puzzle that he had spent hundreds of hours writing rules and designing schemes for. The fact that the jigsaw puzzle went off without a hitch was a "huge success" for his brother, Gabe recalls. Finally, after the game, Sam is running around Stanford's college campus.
"When he really puts all his energy into something, even something like a puzzle that only nerds and dumb people do, he succeeds," Gabe said.
He uses it to pass the boring moments.
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4. He's a fan of Rihanna and Pop
"You'd often see him watching football on one screen, watching YouTube videos like Rihanna on the other, replying to messages on the third, trading on the fourth, trading on the fifth. When you're on the phone, it's almost all happening at the same time," said Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alameda Research, about Bankman-Fried's multitasking capabilities.
Bankman-Fried said that it is not difficult for people around him to notice that he often listens to Rihanna's songs.
"In fact, there's a lot of correlation between an artist's popularity and how much I like them overall," says Bankman-Fried. "I prefer to think that the so-called good music is the music that people like, which is a good measure."
While his music preferences include the likes of Rihanna and Kanye West, he mostly listens to pop music.
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5. People often think he's a programmer, but he's not
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6. In 2010, he attended a 5-week high school math camp and barely slept
Bankman-Fried is known for sleeping four hours a night in a bean bag chair at his desk.
Trabucco, who met Bankman-Fried in 2010 during ave-week math camp at Mount Holyoke College, recalls that Bankman-Fried had always had trouble sleeping and never seemed to need that much sleep.
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Bankman-Fried was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was studying physics.
In college, he joined a fraternity called Epsilon Theta, a group of about 20 people who traded the usual college format of drinking and partying for puzzles and board games.
8. He and the FTX team often take calls from investors at 3:00 and 4:00 am.
Multiple investors and colleagues at Alameda and FTX described in detail how Bankman-Fried was able to answer the phone at any time, even at 3 or 4 in the morning.
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Bankman-Fried's work and rest characteristics are very simple
Ryan Salame, CEO of FTX Digital Market, once chose to cancel a client meeting and let Bankman-Fried continue to sleep, when he had been working for about 30 hours straight.
When Bankman-Fried got up, he came up and said, 'Why didn't you wake me up? That's not right, no doubt you'll have to wake me up next time'," Salame said.
Edith Yeung, a venture capitalist at Race Capital and one of FTX's seed investors, had a similar experience when speaking with the Hong Kong team.
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9. Alameda employees donate 50% or more of their salary to charities that really do
Effective altruism is a philosophy that emphasizes using one's own resources to achieve the greatest good for others.
This philosophy is baked into Alameda's approach. Initially, employees were required to donate at least 50 percent of their salary to charity, according to a software engineer who worked at FTX and Alameda. He later added that the company rule was not conducive to recruiting more talent.
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10. Bankman-Fried may have political ambitions
"In 10 years, I expect SBF to be one of the richest men in the world and solve some of humanity's most critical problems - and while that won't happen any time soon, I do think he will at some point go from The focus on FTX shifted to exploring global issues," Noah Dummett, a former trader at FTX and Alameda, wrote in an email to Insider. "It's not surprising that he's had a political career because he's doing things for the right reasons."
Bankman-Fried hasn't completely ruled out his political future, either.
"I'm interested in politics because I think at least that's something I'm going to focus on, and I've started to make a difference in other ways," Bankman-Fried said. "And I'm going to continue to be a part of the DC scene because I think it's important, and it's really valuable in its own right."
He has moved into politics, becoming one of President Biden's biggest donors to the 2020 campaign, according to multiple insiders, and he appears capable of addressing DC's growing interest in cryptocurrencies with moves to build relationships with regulators. Pay attention to its trend.
Bankman-Fried's outstanding ability to work with regulators is part of the reason why Lightspeed's Wu chose to invest in FTX.
The ability to be compliant in any of the jurisdictions they're in is because they've had an active dialogue with the regulators, and of course they've had an active dialogue with every jurisdiction, if not all of them, they Definitely also anticipating what is going to be an active dialogue with regulators in every jurisdiction,” Wu said.
But Bankman-Fried's approach to ordinance so far has been more akin to that of a philanthropist, according to his brother.
"He's really setting the rules as a philanthropist, not just as a businessman looking for more corporate benefits," Gabe said. "It's really important to start a movement and mobilize people who want to make real change."
