TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is included in the list of the richest people released by Forbes with total assets US$ 22.5 billion or around Rp 320 trillion (assuming an exchange rate of Rp 14,212 per US dollar). The coffers of wealth he collected before he was 30 years old were obtained from crypto-.
Though, before Bankman-Fried never really believed in digital assets. In fact, efour years ago, he didn’t own a single Bitcoin.
But now, at the age of not yet 39 years, Sam Bankman-Fried has entered the Forbes 400 this year and is at number 32. Previously, his name was also included in the Forbes 2021 30 Under 30 list in the financial category.
Prior to his foray into crypto, Bankman-Fried went to college and earned a degree in physics at MIT, but it all came down to halves. After graduation, he took up a high-paying finance job trading ETFs for the quant firm Jane Street Capital, and funneled part of his six-figure salary to philanthropic causes.
In 2017, he quit his job and launched Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading company with about $1 million in savings from friends and family. The man who was born in 1992 then set up shop in Berkeley, California, Airbnb with a few college graduates and working hard in the arbitrage trade.
At the time, Bankman-Fried noticed that if he bought Bitcoin in the United States and sold it in Japan, he would earn 30 percent more. Until one day, the staff had to stop working and flock to foreign exchange websites because they couldn’t convert Japanese yen to dollars quickly.
At its peak, in January 2018, he said he was moving $25 million worth of Bitcoin every day. Dissatisfied with the quality of the major crypto exchanges, he started to focus on his own exchange.
– .
