Crypto's Golden Boy and the Billion-Dollar Collapse

He wore shorts to meetings, slept on a beanbag and promised to give it all away.

By thirty, Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the richest people on earth. His crypto exchange, FTX, had its name on a basketball arena and its ads in the Super Bowl. Tom Brady and Steph Curry promoted it. Some of the world's most powerful investors lined up to back it. Washington treated him as the responsible face of a reckless industry, and the press asked whether he was the next Warren Buffett.

Then, in a single week in November 2022, it was gone.

One news article. One tweet from a rival. Billions of dollars in withdrawal requests that FTX couldn't pay, because the money customers believed was safe had already been spent.

How did a math prodigy who talked about saving the world end up convicted of one of the largest financial frauds in American history? Who knew, and when? And how did so many brilliant people miss what was hiding in plain sight?

Sam Bankman-Fried tells the inside story of crypto's golden boy, from the secret code that let his trading firm dip into customer funds to the courtroom where his closest friends testified against him.