How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire
Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, both renowned Stanford scholars, opened doors for their son and provided a halo effect for his company.
Their kid seemed “bred for the role of crypto exchange founder and CEO,” as a fawning profile published by Sequoia Capital, one of FTX’s biggest investors, put it. The article, which attempted to explain why one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firms had chosen to give $150 million to a young man who was caught playing video games on his computer in the middle of an investor pitch meeting, offered two pieces of evidence in support of its assertion. The first was that Bankman-Fried worked briefly at a Wall Street trading firm. The second was that his parents were Stanford law professors.
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