The Crypto Bro Of Last Resort

Sam Bankman-Fried taps his wealth to rescue companies— and protect his businesses

- Pat Regnier

Over the span of 14 days in June, Sam BankmanFried, wunderkind quant-turned-cryptocurrency billionaire, went on a dealmaking spree unlike any other in the brief history of the industry. Transactions came in dizzying, rapid-fire succession: The co-founder and chief executive officer of digital-asset exchange FTX bought two companies, propped up the crypto platform BlockFi, and tried to save another, Voyager Digital, with a large loan.

In all, Bankman-Fried committed about $1 billion, a staggering sum to risk—even for someone worth $10 billion—in the midst of a crypto rout that’s wiped out $2 trillion in market value in only eight months. To his legions of fans, this is further proof that SBF, as they call him, is the patron of crypto, a benevolent, deep-pocketed investor who’s defending the industry in its time of peril.

Perhaps. An alternative interpretation is that like John Pierpont Morgan a century ago and Warren Buffett in modern times, Bankman-Fried is using the bad fortune of rivals to expand his empire on the cheap. And if there’s an element of saving the industry to the bailouts he’s arranging, that’s because the crisis, if big enough, could imperil his businesses, too. “He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his own heart,” says Chris McCann, a general partner at Race Capital, one of the first venture firms to invest in FTX, the company at the core of SBF’s enterprise. “His ambition knows no bounds at this point.”