The man formerly nicknamed the “King Of Crypto” has seen his company collapse, stepped down as chief executive and now faces criminal investigation.
Long interviews with him, conducted via video chat from his office desk in the Bahamas, have filled the internet in recent years.
There’s an irritating clicking noise in some of them.
The sound is constant and plainly emanating from the American entrepreneur’s mouse as his interviewees listen closely to his astonishing account of how he became a multibillionaire in five years.
“Click, click, click,” it says in quick, on-and-off spurts.
Meanwhile, Mr Bankman-gaze Fried’s flits around the screen. The videos don’t show what he’s doing on his computer, but his tweets might give us a good idea. “I’m (in)famous for playing League of Legends while on phone conversations,” he wrote on Twitter in February 2021.
Mr Bankman-Fried – the former boss of embattled cryptocurrency exchange FTX – is an avid gamer. And in a series of tweets to his nearly one million followers, he explained why.
Playing the team fantasy battle game was his way to get his mind to switch off from running two companies trading billions of dollars a day. “Some people drink too much; some gamble. I play League,” he said.
Another tale about the 30-year-gaming old’s has reappeared online after his bitcoin enterprise crashed in spectacular way.
According to a blog post from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Mr Bankman-Fried engaged in an intensive League of Legends combat with their investment team during a high-level video chat. It didn’t appear to bother them at all. The firm then invested $210 million in Mr Bankman-company, Fried’s FTX.
Sequoia Capital has subsequently deleted the fawning blog post and indicated that their FTX investment is now being written off as a loss. The business is not the only one that has suffered massive losses since Mr Bankman-$32 Fried’s billion empire crumbled.
It’s a dizzying fall, and Mr Bankman-climb Fried’s is its own spectacular narrative of risks, rewards, and beanbags.
Mr Bankman-Fried studied physics and math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a famous US research university.
However, the young intelligent undergraduate claims that it was lessons learnt in the student dorms that set him on his route to being wealthy.
