Voting Station

Sam Bankman-Fried

Please vote to see the next celebrity.

Entrepreneur

The Resume

    (March 6, 1992- )
    Born in Stanford, California
    Founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX (2019)
    Also founded the quantitative trading platform Alameda Research (2007)
    Second-largest individual donor to the 2020 Presidential campaign of Joe Biden
    Indicted on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy (December 12, 2022)
    Arrested at his residence in the Bahamas (December 12, 2022)
    Returned to the United States and pleaded not guilty
    Released on $250 million bond, the largest bond set in an American criminal proceeding

Why he might be annoying:

    He is a vegan.
    He invested $200 million in the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which then ran a glowing profile of him.
    He described launching the charitable FTX Future Fund as ‘a dumb game we wore Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.’
    Alameda repeatedly profited by amassing crypto tokens just ahead of FTX publicly announcing its decision to list those tokens for trade.
    He reportedly arranged for FTX to loan $4 to 10 billion from FTX to Alameda, which then loaned $1 billion to him personally.
    John J. Ray III, an expert on corporate restructuring who replaced Bankman-Fried as CEO of FTX, described the relationship between FTX and Alameda as ‘a complete failure of corporate controls.’
    During the FTX solvency crisis, he experienced the single largest one-day drop in net worth recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, going from $10.5 billion to $991 million (November 8, 2022).

Why he might not be annoying:

    Both of his parents were law professors at Stanford.
    He attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically gifted high school students.
    Before founding his own businesses, he worked for Jane Street Capital and donated half his earnings to charities.
    He was included on Forbes ’30 Under 30’ list (2021).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 11 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1661 Votes: 77.00% Annoying