, he joined the trading firm Jane Street. It was there that he started donating half his salary to charity and embracing effective altruism, a movement whose proponents say they take an evidence-based approach to charitable giving. Image caption, Bankman Fried once appeared on stage at a conference with former UK leader Tony Blair and former US President Bill Clinton His parents were major influences - both are Stanford law professors who are well-known advocates for social equity. Michael Lewis, author of a new book about Mr Bankman-Fried, told the BBC he believes the entrepreneur simply saw cryptocurrency as a means to make money to change the world. In 2017, Mr Bankman-Fried co-founded Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund which he says was at one point making him a million dollars a day. Two years later he set up FTX in Hong Kong. FTX was launched in 2019 by Mr Bankman-Fried and his former MIT classmate Gary Wang. The exchange acted like an unregulated bank, allowing people to trade money for cryp){kind=link}
One of the most-watched fraud trials in years is about to begin in New York. In the dock is Sam Bankman-Fried, who once owned a $32bn business and seemed to have the world at his feet.
The 31-year-old was a dishevelled-looking whizzkid who had A-listers lining up to endorse and invest in his crypto exchange, FTX.
There were glossy TV ads for the Super Bowl with Larry David, Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady. He donated millions of dollars to good causes, and said in interviews that he wanted to give most of his fortune away.
But his empire came crashing down, and investors lost billions. He’s been accused of building his fortune on lies, which he denies, and he faces up to 115 years in prison.
Born to prominent liberal academics and growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley, Mr Bankman-Fried showed an astonishing aptitude for maths puzzles at an early age.