Sam Bankman-Fried is one of the richest people in crypto, thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm. The son of two Stanford law professors, he studied physics at MIT but was drawn to "effective altruism," the utilitarian-inflected notion of doing the most good possible. So he took a job trading ETFs at a quant firm, donating a chunk of his salary to charity, then jumped into crypto trading in late 2017, when he spied a lucrative arbitrage opportunity. Bankman-Fried launched his own exchange, FTX, in 2019. Built "by traders, for traders," it's one of the leading exchanges for buying and selling crypto derivatives. Investors valued FTX at $18 billion in 2021, helping make him one of the richest people under 30 in history. The exchange and its U.S. operations hit a combined $40 billion valuation in January 2022. Most of his wealth, which he says he will eventually donate to charity based on a philosophy called "earning to give," is tied up in ownership of about half of FTX and a share of its FTT tokens.
