Once upon a time, there were two titans of the crypto industry: Sam Bankman-Fried, the child of Stanford professors and founder of FTX, and Changpeng Zhao, the nomadic founder of Binance. The pair were the faces of crypto, generating billion-dollar fortunes comparable to the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates. That is, until their rivalry threatened to burn the entire industry to the ground.
For years, the pair had waged a cold war as Sam fought to unseat Zhao, or CZ, and dominate the industry. Then, last year, CZ fired a warning shot: one that would send FTX into a downward spiral, and reveal what prosecutors describe as a staggering $8bn fraud at the heart of Sam’s empire. Now, as Sam potentially faces decades in prison, journalist Tom Wright has been investigating the hidden origins of his feud with CZ – starting with a key witness: CZ himself.
Starting his career at a secretive Wall Street firm, Sam learns to gamble and is praised for taking big risks. He embraces Effective Altruism, a movement aimed at doing “the most good,” and starts “earning to give” big donations to charity. He strikes out on his own to found a trading firm, Alameda Research, and exploit bitcoin price differences between Japan and the US — but is his origin story of immense arbitrage profits really all it’s cracked up to be? When staff quit in protest over his ethics, Sam doubles down and turns to an old friend from his Wall Street days to serve as his loyal lieutenant: Caroline Ellison.
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