Crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried lost 94% of his fortune overnight, marking the biggest one-day wealth collapse among billionaires on record
- FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried lost 94% of his net worth on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported.
- That marks the biggest single-day drop in a billionaire's fortune compared to their total net worth.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was worth $16 billion earlier this week, saw his fortune gutted by 94% to $1 billion on Tuesday. It marks the biggest wealth collapse a billionaire has ever taken in a single day, per Bloomberg.
On Tuesday, the 30-year-old CEO announced that his crypto exchange FTX is being sold to rival firm Binance in order to relieve a severe liquidity crunch. Bankman-Fried's 53% stake in FTX was worth $6.2 billion, while another $7.4 billion of his fortune came from his crypto trading house, Alameda Research, Bloomberg reported.
With Binance's acquisition of FTX, Bloomberg's wealth index now values both FTX and Alameda at $1 each, wiping out the perceived worth of Bankman-Fried's biggest holdings.
Sudden losses of this magnitude are common among the world's richest people, but never has a billionaire parted ways with such a gigantic proportion of their fortune within one day. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg lost $29 billion on February 3, but his net worth was still estimated at $84.3 billion that day.
In November 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk lost $50 billion in two days when he polled Twitter users if he should sell 10% of his stake in his automaker — but he remained the world's richest person by the week's end.
Similarly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos retained his position as the world's second-wealthiest man in 2019 despite seeing his fortune drop $36 billion overnight, when he gave up 25% of his Amazon stock to settle his divorce with his former wife MacKenzie Scott.
One billionaire who came close to Bankman-Fried's new record is trader Bill Hwang, who in March 2021 lost his entire $20 billion fortune within two days, after his company Archegos Capital Management defaulted on its loans. The Justice Department later charged Hwang with 11 criminal counts, including fraud, with prosecutors accusing him of inflating his portfolio to borrow more from banks. He and his former CFO have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Bankman-Fried's losses come in the wake of a devastating $600 billion crypto crash this year. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance — the crypto exchange acquiring FTX — lost $79.4 billion of his fortune this year as a result of the crash, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.