Mr. Bankman-Fried’s enterprise and political empire was all the time a household affair. The FTX founder was a prolific political donor, and he was a part of a community of contributors who gave cash to teams really useful by Thoughts the Hole, individuals conversant in the group mentioned. He additionally helped bankroll a nonprofit group referred to as Guarding In opposition to Pandemics that was run by his 27-year-old brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried.
Mr. Bankman was deeply concerned in FTX. In its early days, he helped the corporate recruit its first attorneys. Final yr, he joined FTX workers in conferences on Capitol Hill and suggested his son as Mr. Bankman-Fried ready to testify to the Home Monetary Providers Committee, an individual conversant in the matter mentioned. FTX workers sometimes consulted him on tax-related issues, the particular person mentioned.
“From the beginning each time I used to be helpful, I’d help,” Mr. Bankman mentioned on an FTX podcast in August.
Mr. Bankman visited the FTX workplaces within the Bahamas as usually as as soon as a month, an individual who noticed him there mentioned. Among the many much-younger workers, he cultivated an avuncular persona, regaling workers with tales from his son’s youth, the particular person mentioned. He and Ms. Fried stayed in a $16.4 million home in Outdated Fort Bay, a gated neighborhood in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas; the couple’s names seem on actual property paperwork, in keeping with Reuters, although Mr. Bankman-Fried has mentioned the home was “supposed to be the corporate’s property.”
Ms. Heller, the couple’s spokeswoman, mentioned Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried “by no means supposed to and by no means believed they’d any useful or financial possession in the home.”
As an worker, Mr. Bankman targeted on FTX’s charitable operations. He put collectively the Miami occasion, deciding on the groups of highschool college students who competed for $1 million in FTX grants.
Mr. Bankman additionally leveraged household connections to develop FTX’s attain. His sister, Barbara Miller, works in Florida as a political marketing consultant and launched him to Newton Sanon, the chief government of OIC of South Florida, a nonprofit group that helps individuals with work drive improvement coaching to advertise financial mobility. (Ms. Miller didn’t reply to a request for remark.)