Former Crypto Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried Has $100k Left

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A few months ago, at the height of both his fame and fortune, the wealth of Sam Bankman-Fried was thought to be around $16 billion. By some estimates it was even $26.5 billion, depending on the value of FTT, the crypto coin of his company FTX.

As he admitted to Axios in an interview this week, Sam now only has some $100,000 left in his bank account. To put it in percentage terms, in the past month he lost about 99% of his wealth.

That is about $100,000 too much

I’ll feel a bit better about #SBF when he has absolutely nothing, the same way he left his customers pic.twitter.com/i3U9p5mRSs

— Gerald Posner (@geraldposner) November 30, 2022

Asked by the Axios interviewer what his personal financial situation was now, SBF said:

Am I allowed to say a negative number? I mean, I have no idea. I don’t know. I had $100,000 in my bank account last I checked.

He repeated the statement in another interview, saying he was down to one credit card.

Underdressed genius look

The collapse of FTX, combined with the fall of Meta (formerly Facebook) stock this year, has certainly left one style of CEOs looking for a new pair of clothes. Because, as the Wall Street Journal remarked:

The seismic flameout of FTX… helps deflate one of the startup world’s great myths: the underdressed genius founder.

Both Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta were known for their disheveled look. SBF wore frumpled T-shirts with shorts while Zuckerberg was mostly in hoodies. That look will no longer work if you want to make investors excited about your company apparently.

Call for regulation

Asked what would have stopped FTX from collapsing, Bankman-Fried said that “regulation and proper oversight” is now needed more than ever.