He was one of the world’s youngest billionaires who dated everyone from Bill Clinton to Gisele Bundchen.
So spending his 32nd birthday behind bars this month will have come as quite a shock for Sam Bankman-Fried, the one-time wunderkind of the cryptocurrency world.
Today, the disgraced tycoon finds out from a prison cell how many birthdays he will celebrate – and whether he will ever celebrate one again as a free man.
SBF, as he is commonly known, will be sentenced tonight for what has been described as “one of the largest financial fraudsters in American history.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher – and yesterday he made a final attempt at leniency in the form of a collection of letters from supporters to the judge.
Well connected: disgraced crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried with supermodel Gisele Bundchen
One even tried to use the fact he was vegan to his advantage, saying he would be “an asset to society” if he showed leniency.
In a submission, the friend wrote: ‘Sam had a deep feeling for every living thing, including farm animals – so much so that he adhered to a vegan diet and convinced several others in our living group to become vegan too. He took every possible step to reduce suffering.”
The maximum sentence for the FTX founder, described in court as a “shy” man who “often struggled socially”, is 110 years, although this seems highly unlikely.
Having been in prison since August, when his bail was revoked, the prosecutor is seeking between 40 and 50 years because of his “unparalleled greed and hubris.”
His lawyers have argued that this would amount to a ‘death penalty’ and would show that the US government simply wants to ‘break him’.
They say he has already been severely punished by poor conditions in the Brooklyn jail where he languished last summer.
His crime, and the back and forth over the appropriate punishment, has drawn comparisons to fraudster Bernie Madoff who died in prison in 2021 at the age of 82 while serving 150 years.
His crimes began before Bankman-Fried was even born.
After FTX built into one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges where users bought and sold bitcoin and other digital currencies, SBF was tipped to become the first trillionaire to walk the planet.
With his fortune came fame and appearances alongside world leaders such as Clinton and Tony Blair, as well as pop star Katy Perry and actor Orlando Bloom.
As always, he was dressed in his signature uniform of baggy shorts and old T-shirts
His celebrity contacts were not cheap and he spent eye-watering sums on stars for endorsements – paying American football icon Tom Brady £45 million and his then wife Bundchen £16 million to appear in adverts for FTX.
Court date: Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas in December that year and extradited to the US, where he was charged with seven counts of fraud and money laundering
There was even talk of a £25 million-a-year deal with Taylor Swift, but it never materialized.
Like many other techies, SBF himself believed in ‘effective altruism’ and had pledged to donate his money to charities.
But it wasn’t just charity work that excited him. He contributed more than £30 million to the 2022 US elections, mainly to the Democrats.
All the while he lived in luxury in the Bahamas, where FTX was based, in a £25million penthouse with colleagues including one-time girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
His world collapsed in 2022 when his business empire went from £21 billion to virtually nothing in a matter of days, in one of the most dramatic financial collapses the world has ever seen.
With rumors of fraud swirling, SBF was arrested in the Bahamas in December that year and extradited to the US, where he was charged with seven counts of fraud and money laundering.
Ellison, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to her side and later testified against Bankman-Fried at his trial. FTX co-founder Gary Wang also pleaded guilty to several charges.
After hearing that SBF stole around £8 billion from users of its FTX crypto exchange – and spent it on his lavish lifestyle, properties, risky investments and political donations – a New York jury indicted him in November found guilty of all seven charges last year.
US Attorney Damian Williams said: “Sam Bankman-Fried committed one of the largest financial frauds in American history. This case has always been about lying, cheating and stealing and we have no patience for that.”
And now today’s sentencing.
In their comments to Judge Lewis Kaplan, prosecutors wrote: “The enormous scale of Bankman-Fried’s fraud calls for severe penalties.
His life in recent years has been one of unparalleled greed and hubris, of risk-seeking and repeated gambling with other people’s money.’
They added: ‘Even now, Bankman-Fried refuses to admit that what he did was wrong.’
New FTX boss John Ray, who was appointed to oversee the bankruptcy and recover as much money as possible, said SBF “continues to live a delusional life” after spending money on “luxury homes, private jets and overpriced speculative ventures’. .
The business recovery expert added: ‘Customers will never be in the same position they were in had they not encountered Bankman-Fried and his so-called altruism.’
SBF’s own lawyers have hit back, saying the prosecutor was trying to portray him as “a depraved supervillain.”
Arguing that a five-decade sentence “adopts a medieval view of punishment to arrive at what amounts to a recommendation for the death penalty in prison,” they added: “That is not justice.”
And Bankman-Fried’s parents, Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, told the judge they feared for their son’s life in prison.
“His father and I face the very real possibility that we will not live long enough to see him free,” his mother wrote.
“I’d like to trade places with him if I could.”
He and she will find out his fate within hours.
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