Sam Bankman-Fried’s Dad and mom Beneath Scrutiny in FTX Collapse

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 advisable by Thoughts the Hole, folks conversant in the group stated. He additionally helped bankroll a nonprofit group known as Guarding Towards 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 stated. FTX staff sometimes consulted him on tax-related issues, the individual stated.

“From the beginning every time I used to be helpful, I’d assist,” Mr. Bankman stated 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 stated. Among the many much-younger workers, he cultivated an avuncular persona, regaling staff with tales from his son’s youth, the individual stated. He and Ms. Fried stayed in a $16.4 million home in Previous Fort Bay, a gated group in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas; the couple’s names seem on actual property paperwork, in response to Reuters, although Mr. Bankman-Fried has stated the home was “meant to be the corporate’s property.”

Ms. Heller, the couple’s spokeswoman, stated Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried “by no means meant to and by no means believed that they had any helpful or financial possession in the home.”

As an worker, Mr. Bankman centered 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 broaden FTX’s attain. His sister, Barbara Miller, works in Florida as a political guide and launched him to Newton Sanon, the chief government of OIC of South Florida, a nonprofit group that helps folks with work drive improvement coaching to advertise financial mobility. (Ms. Miller didn’t reply to a request for remark.)