The spectacular implosion of crypto’s biggest star, explained

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Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the crypto industry’s biggest stars, has said a lot of things over the years, most recently that he’s “sorry” and he “fucked up.”

Before that, he said he might spend as much as $1 billion on politics in 2024. He said he had a lot of ideas for policing the crypto industry and using his crypto-fueled fortune for good. He said he’d be fine bailing out some crypto companies in trouble as crypto winter hit over the summer. All of these claims are now in limbo thanks to another thing he said on November 7: that his crypto exchange, FTX, was “fine.” It was not. Instead, the next day, the exchange imploded.

“It’s incredible how quickly these things can spiral out of control,” Molly White, a software engineer and prominent crypto critic behind the website Web3 is Going Just Great, told me.

Whether or not you’re a crypto person, chances are you’ve come into some sort of contact with FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried — better known as SBF — in some fashion. He’s partnered with big names, such as soon-to-be-divorced couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, to spread the crypto gospel. He co-hosted Crypto Bahamas with medium name Anthony Scaramucci; figures such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair attended. (Disclosure: Future Perfect, Vox’s effective altruism-inspired vertical, received a grant from Bankman-Fried’s Building a Stronger Future foundation in 2022.)

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