Sublime

CZ was Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the crypto exchange Binance. Born in Jiangsu province, he was raised, from adolescence, in Canada, and educated there, returning eventually to China, with Canadian citizenship. He’d run through some ordinary jobs on the fringes of high finance—including a stint as a developer at Bloomberg—before landing as the chief te

On the morning of May 11, 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried made his first television appearance. He sat at his trading desk and talked into his computer screen to two female reporters on Bloomberg

In the first eighteen months of FTX’s existence, there had been several other dustups with Binance of this sort. CZ developed what three of his employees at the time described as an obsession with his new rival. He’d ask staff for regular reports about FTX, and speak of FTX in ways he would not of the other exchanges.

Inside of three years, it appeared, Sam Bankman-Fried had created a business so valuable that his share of it implied that he was now the richest person in the world under the age of thirty. “When I first looked at the numbers, I was like, Can this really be true—can this guy really be worth twenty billion dollars?” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, who

KEN GRIFFIN Founder and CEO, Citadel; Founder, Citadel Services

And yet it still obviously had lots of room to grow. Its biggest rival, Binance, had five times the trading volume of FTX, which meant that it likely had roughly five times FTX’s revenues and five times FTX’s market value. The experts who tried to determine the present value of rich people had trouble putting a number on CZ’s. No one was sure how m