Wait, Weren't His Parents Law Professors?

The Stanford genius bubble that birthed SBF.

- ELIZABETH WEIL

IF YOU GO to Crystal Springs Uplands School, it’s both difficult to truly succeed (as in exceeding expectations) and difficult to fail. You know the kind of place. The floor is so high, the net is so secure. You’re born with a feeling your intelligence is a gift to society, a confidence that you can do no wrong. Everyone’s parent is either a Stanford professor or a tech mogul or Steve Jobs, whose son attended the school at the same time as Sam BankmanFried, who graduated in 2010.

“There was one kid who was like the youngest global chess champion ever when he was, like, 11 years old,” one SBF-era alumnus of Crystal Springs Uplands School told me. (This was Daniel Naroditsky, class of ’14.) “Another girl from the school just made it into Forbes. She’s like 28 years old. She raised millions of dollars for a start-up.” (Ellen Rudolph, class of ’12.) Starting here, how could you rise so high that you ever impressed anybody? How could you fall with enough force to crash through the goldmesh safety net?

And yet, even here, SBF was special. These were the days of grand tech optimism. Facebook introduced the like button in SBF’s junior year. Google still used its motto “Don’t be evil.” By age 14, SBF was reading up on utilitarian philosophy—the idea that one could use data and rationality to deduce right action, defined as producing the most good for the most people. (The means of getting there don’t matter.)