Sam Bankman-Fried looked unstoppable.
The 30-year-old had built a £21bn business empire and was the CEO of FTX, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange.
More than one million customers worldwide were using his platform to buy assets like Bitcoin – enticed by star-studded adverts that made everything look simple and safe.
Bankman-Fried – known as SBF for short – had become one of the biggest names in the crypto industry too, with his company swooping in to save smaller firms after they were tipped into bankruptcy.
But in the space of just three days, a series of bombshell allegations led to the spectacular collapse of FTX and a bankruptcy of its own.
Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth dropped by a staggering 94% in 24 hours – the biggest one-day fall ever suffered by a billionaire, according to Bloomberg.
Hundreds of thousands are locked out of their life savings – an estimated 80,000 of them in the UK.
Vast sums of money have gone missing from the exchange, amid allegations that customer funds were mismanaged.
No longer a billionaire, Bankman-Fried says his net worth has dwindled to $100,000 (£80,000) following FTX’s demise – and he admitted it has been a “bad month”.
But it could soon get a lot worse for Bankman-Fried. Criminal investigations have now been launched into the company’s collapse, with aggrieved investors filing a flurry of lawsuits.
So what next for the deposed “Crypto King”, why did his digital empire rise and fall so quickly, and where does it leave this already embattled industry?
An ‘altruistic’ entrepreneur
Californian-born, a poster boy for “effective altruism” (getting rich in order to give money to good causes), a teetotaller and a vegan, Bankman-Fried is in many ways a far cry from the Machiavellian emperors of time gone by.
Still, SBF managed to craft an empire that would even make…
