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Meet Sam Bankman-Fried’s family: His parents are Stanford Law professors, his aunt is a dean at Columbia, and his brother is founder…

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Sam Bankman-Fried was raised in an academic family in Silicon Valley. He grew up playing games like chess and bridge.

Sam Bankman-Fried FTX CEO crypto
Bankman-Fried cofounded FTX in 2019 and was its CEO.FTX

The FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas Monday, in a spectacular fall from grace after his crypto exchange collapsed last month.

Bankman-Fried — whose wealth peaked at an estimated $26 billion in March, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — has been charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A judge in the Bahamas denied him bail Tuesday.

As his troubles unravel, Bankman-Fried’s high-profile family has been in the spotlight. His parents were spotted Tuesday at their son’s hearing in the Bahamas and have been living with him on the island nation for over a month.

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In November, Reuters reported a $16.4 million house in the Bahamas listed Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories. The house is in a gated community with beach access and was described in property records as a vacation home.

Last month, Bankman-Fried told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit that he called his parents when FTX was collapsing. He added that his parents “bore no responsibility” for FTX’s downfall.

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“Anyone close to me, including my parents and employees and coworkers, who fought with the company to push forward, they were hurt by this,” Bankman-Fried said. “They bore no responsibility for that. I feel really bad about that. I feel really grateful for the support my parents are still giving me throughout all of this.”

We rounded up some of the prominent members of Bankman-Fried’s family. Bankman and Fried did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to a spokesperson outside regular business hours. His brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, and aunt Linda Fried also did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

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His father, Joseph Bankman, is a Stanford Law professor who’s also a clinical psychologist.

Screen cap of Joseph Bankman's bio at Stanford University
Joseph Bankman has postponed his class that was set to start in January amid the FTX fallout.Stanford University

Bankman, a law professor at Stanford University, is Bankman-Fried’s father.

Described in his official biography as a “leading scholar in the field of tax law,” Bankman teaches mental-health law and is a scholar who writes about law and psychology.

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Bankman was also a paid FTX employee for nearly a year before the exchange collapsed, a spokesperson for Bankman and Fried told The Wall Street Journal Monday. He was mostly working on charity projects at FTX, the spokesperson told the media outlet.

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Bankman had a law class that was scheduled to start in January, but that has been pushed back until the spring as he remains in the Bahamas with his son, according to The Journal.

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The lawyer earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1980, according to his biography on Stanford’s website.

His mother, Barbara Fried, is a professor emerita of law at Stanford.

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Screen grab of Babara Fried bio from Stanford University website.
Barbara Fried cofounded Mind the Gap, a super PAC.Stanford University

Bankman-Fried’s mother is also a law professor at Stanford University.

Her scholarly interests are “at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy,” according to her biography on the university’s website.

Fried cofounded Mind the Gap, a super political action committee that uses statistical analysis to determine the dollar-value influence of donations on Democrats running for the House of Representatives. She resigned from Mind the Gap in November, The New York Times reported. The Times did not specify why she resigned.

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Fried retired from teaching in September and didn’t have plans to teach this year, a spokesperson told The Journal.

She graduated from Harvard with a Juris Doctor in 1983, according to her biography on the Stanford site.

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His younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, founded and ran a nonprofit called Guarding Against Pandemics — which was in part funded by his sibling.

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Screen cap of Gabriel Bankman-Fried at the FP Global Health Forum
Gabriel Bankman-Fried stepped down as the director of Guarding Against Pandemics in mid-November.FP Global Health Forum

Gabriel Bankman-Fried is Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother.

In 2020, Gabriel Bankman-Fried founded and ran the nonprofit Guarding Against Pandemics, which aims to prevent another pandemic. The nonprofit was partly funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, Puck reported.

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The two brothers have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations, and initiatives that hope to boost biosecurity and pandemic prevention, The Washington Post reported.

Gabriel Bankman-Fried stepped down as the director of the nonprofit in mid-November, The Post said.

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His aunt Linda Fried is the dean of the public-health school at Columbia University.

Screen cap of Linda Fried Dean bio at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Linda Fried is a public-health expert.Columbia University

Fried, the dean of Columbia University’s public-health school, is Sam Bankman-Fried’s aunt, according to The Washington Post.

Described on the school’s website as a “leader in the fields of epidemiology and geriatric medicine,” Fried was trained in cardiovascular and chronic disease, epidemiology, and geriatrics.

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Fried graduated from Rush Medical College in 1979 with a doctor of medicine and got a master’s in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1984, her biography on the Columbia website says.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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