Bankman-Fried got a message saying MoneyGram International Inc. was for sale and spent a few seconds considering whether the company could be a good bet. [...] “Meh,” Bankman-Fried wrote back.

“Every minute you spend sleeping is costing you X thousand dollars, and that directly means you can save this many less lives,”

These days, Bankman-Fried lives in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. FTX is planning to build a 1,000-employee campus overlooking the ocean. For now it’s headquartered in a one-story red-roofed building near the airport.

I ask him about his trip to the Super Bowl. “I don’t know if ‘fun’ is exactly the word I would use to describe it,” Bankman-Fried says, scratching an itchy patch on his arm. “Parties are not my scene.”

When he’s not at the office, he crashes at an apartment with 10 or so roommates, though it’s a penthouse at the island’s nicest resort. Bankman-Fried figures as many as five of his co-workers are also billionaires. All are around his age.

He says FTX is running an honest market, checks customers’ backgrounds, buys carbon credits to offset its emissions, and is more efficient than the mainstream financial system. But it’s clear the main appeal for him is getting rich quick.

FTX is only the No. 3 crypto exchange by volume yet handles $15 billion of trading on a good day.

Instead of shares of Microsoft Corp., users are buying and selling Bitcoin, Ether, Dogecoin, and hundreds of other weird cryptocurrencies.

He wants to offer cryptocurrency futures, swaps, and options, which he sees as a potential $25 billion-a-day market. If he succeeds in taking over crypto, the mainstream finance industry is next.

MacAskill told Bankman-Fried more about another one of his ideas: “earning to give.” He said that for someone of Bankman-Fried’s mathematical talents, it might make sense to pursue a high-paying job on Wall Street, then donate his earnings to charity.

For three years after graduation, he worked as a trader and every year gave away about half of his six-figure salary to animal-welfare groups and other effective-altruism-approved charities.

Capital controls prevented traders from sending cash home from South Korea, where Bitcoin sold for 30% more than in the U.S. But in Japan, which didn’t have those rules, Bitcoin still traded at a 10% premium. In theory, someone could earn 10% every day by buying Bitcoin on a U.S. exchange and sending it to a Japanese one to sell. At that rate, in a little more than four months, $10,000 would turn into $1 billion.

Once Bankman-Fried found willing banks, each day became a race.

At the peak, Alameda was sending $15 million back and forth daily and generating a $1.5 million profit. Within a few weeks, before the price difference disappeared, the company had earned about $20 million.

It took Bankman-Fried’s crew four months to write the code underlying a new exchange, which opened for business in May 2019.

Customers could borrow up to 101 times their collateral—slightly higher leverage than offered by the competition.

Alameda, which he no longer runs day to day, made an additional $1 billion in profit in 2021 alone.