The Stanford Law professor father of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has canceled his upcoming classes reportedly in anticipation of helping his son who could face criminal charges.
Joseph Bankman was on the docket to teach tax policy next year at the prestigious university. But as of November, the most recent course catalog shows that his classes were canceled, the San Francisco Standard reported.
His 30-year-old son, also known as SBF, is the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX that recently collapsed amid allegations he mismanaged customer funds.
Bankman flew to the Bahamas and to be by his son’s side, and now it’s believed he cleared his schedule to help with a legal defense as the former crypto boss faces possible criminal charges.
Bankman-Fried was accused of funneling customer deposits to FTX’s affiliated trading firm Alameda Research, and the exchange experienced withdrawals of about $6 billion in just 72 hours.
Joseph Bankman, the Stanford Law professor father of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has canceled his upcoming classes reportedly in anticipation of helping his son who could face criminal charges
Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, is accused of funneling customer deposits to FTX’s affiliated trading firm Alameda Research, and the exchange had withdrawals of about $6B in just 72 hours
His mother Barbara Fried, is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law, co-founder of Mind the Gap, a ‘secretive Silicon Valley’ PAC that supports Democratic candidates
Bankman-Fried was born on the campus of Stanford University in California to two esteemed law professors at the institution.
His father is Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School.
Bankman’s former students told The San Francisco Standard that the professor was a ‘softie’ and cared deeply about students. He also became a licensed psychologist midway through his career.
‘I’ll be spending substantially all of my resources on Sam’s defense,’ he wrote to the director of a nonprofit that could no longer be funded through the FTX Foundation.
‘I feel really grateful for the support my parents are still giving me throughout all of this,’ Bankman-Fried last week at the NYTimes DealBook Summit.
Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law, and co-founder of Mind the Gap, a ‘secretive Silicon Valley’ PAC that supports Democratic candidates.
Mind the Gap is known for its secretive operations, where it attempts to quickly gather donations over a short period of time to prevent Republicans from mobilizing their own donors in response, according to Vox.
Elon Musk recently suggested that disgraced crypto exchange billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried donated more than $1billion to Democrats before FTX’s collapse.
Musk’s allegation, if true, would mean Bankman-Fried donated significantly more than the initially reported $40million figure to Democratic politicians, ahead of his business’s total meltdown.
Elon Musk, who has been vocally critical of Bankman-Fried, has now claimed that the failed crypto boss donated more than $1billion to Democratic politicians
On Friday, healthcare tech startup CEO Will Mandis tweeted: ‘SBF donating $40m to not go to jail for stealing $10b+ is one of the highest ROI trades of all time,’ referring to the known number in donations to Democratic politicians.
Musk then weighed and responded, ‘That’s just the publicly disclosed number. His actual support of Dem elections is probably over $1B. The money went somewhere, so where did it go?’
Prior to the implosion of FTX late last month – which is largely being blamed on the questionable sharing of funds between FTX and crypto trading firm Alameda Research – SBF had a close relationship with the party in power in Washington, D.C.
He has testified before Congress, met with lawmakers and regulators and donated heavily to left-of-center media operations, which has led to the observation by some that his alleged crimes have been handled more gently than is appropriate by the mainstream media.
Prior to the undoing of his company, Bankman-Fried pledged to give $1billion to political candidates.
It has also emerged that Bankman-Fried was one of the largest Democratic donors in recent cycles, spending a reported $36 million during the last midterm election primarily via the Protect Our Future Pac.
Bankman-Fried claims he donated to both major political parties, though his donations to the Republicans were dark, meaning publicly untraceable.
He said during an interview with Tiffany Fong that he donated ‘about the same amount of money’ to both Democrats and Republicans.
Bankman-Fried has claimed to have donated equal amounts of money to Democrats and Republicans. Prior to the implosion of his crypto exchange, he kept cozy relationships with powerful DC political figures
He claims to have used a loophole in the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling to keep his Republican donations discreet because the ‘liberal’ media would ‘freak the f*** out.’
‘I’ve been their third biggest Republican donor this year,’ he said during the interview released last week.
Though he was Democrats’ second biggest donor during the last campaign cycle, it was recently revealed that Bankman-Fried donated at least $1million to Senate Republicans mere weeks before the dramatic combustion of FTX.
Musk, however, is now publicly contending that Bankman-Fried donated a significantly higher number to ‘Dem elections,’ though it is unclear from where Musk is sourcing his information.
He claims to have used a loophole in the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling to keep his Republican donations discreet because the ‘liberal’ media would ‘freak the f*** out’
Bankman-Fried lived with his FTX co-workers in a luxury home at Albany resort in the Bahamas
Albany, the Bahamas resort where Bankman-Fried set up the FTX headquarters
Prior to FTX, Bankman-Fried studied math and physics at MIT before joining Jane Street Capital in 2013, a Wall Street behemoth that made $17 trillion in trades in 2020.
He quit four years later, moved to the liberal enclave of Berkeley, California, and started Alameda Research. FTX itself was founded in April 2019 and three years later was valued at an eye-watering $32 billion.
The company was initially headquartered in Hong Kong but moved its headquarters to the Bahamas in September 2021, in part because of a crackdown on crypto by China.
Former FTX employees disclosed exorbitant spending Bankman-Fried and his executives undertook on the company dime, which included massages and even private jets ferrying Amazon deliveries to their luxury Bahamas office.
The perks also included massive food stipends. Each of the staff was allowed $200 a day for DoorDash food delivery, according to the Financial Times.
But FTX collapsed last month amid reports it owes billions of dollars to customers.
Bankman-Fried was spotted last week by DailyMail.com on the balcony of his $30m Bahamas penthouse. He said he no longer lives there but remains somewhere in the Bahamas
Bankman-Fried has since been on a recent media blitz as he stands accused of funneling upwards of $10billion from FTX users into Alameda Research.
Last week, he spoke to Good Morning America from his $30million Bahamian penthouse. During the interview, he said that he ‘wasn’t trying’ to manage risk at FTX.
‘I think that there is something even deeper wrong there which is I wasn’t even trying. Like I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX,’ he told GMA.
Bankman-Fried added that if he’d spent ‘an hour a day thinking about risk management’ then his company would not have imploded.
‘I think I stopped working as hard for a bit. You know, honestly if I look back on myself, I think I got a little cocky, I mean more than a little bit and I think part of me like, you know, felt like we made it.’
The 30-year-old also appeared to try and dodge questions about what he knew regarding FTX funds being shuffled around to pay debts for Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried and run by his ex-girlfriend, Carolyn Ellison.
Bankman-Fried is currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over reports he helped funnel $10 million from FTX to Alameda.
He tweeted on Sunday that he would testify before the House Financial Services Committee after he finished ‘learning and reviewing’ the events that led to the spectacular collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.
The U.S. House Financial Services Committee plans to hold a hearing in December to investigate the collapse of FTX and expects to hear from the companies and individuals involved, including founder and CEO Bankman-Fried.
Committee Chair Maxine Waters last week invited Bankman-Fried to participate in the panel’s hearing on December 13.
The crypto CEO whose troubled FTX sparked market panic: Hoodie-wearing vegan once worth ‘$25BILLION’ who sleeps four hours a night
Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried, a vegan who sleeps four hours a night, had become a public face of crypto money, with a personal fortune estimated at nearly $25 billion, which according to Forbes magazine has since shrunk to $100,000.
The success of FTX allowed the platform to forge prestigious partnerships, notably with American football legend Tom Brady and former supermodel Gisele Bundchen, and it featured comedian Larry David in a Super Bowl television advertisement.
Almost always appearing with a hoodie and a dark T-shirt, Bankman-Fried has pledged to donate almost all of his fortune to his favored causes, like animal welfare and the fight against global warming.
The son of Stanford Law School professors and a graduate of the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he worked as a broker on Wall Street before turning to cryptocurrencies in 2017.
Bankman-Fried moved the company to the Bahamas, where taxes are almost nonexistent, saying the Caribbean nation is ‘one of the few countries that has a comprehensive licensing regime for cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges.’
He has been a vocal advocate for smoother access to the crypto market for the general public, particularly in the United States.