Business

Crypto's white knight lost 94% of his wealth in a single day

Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto entrepreneur known for providing a financial lifeline to struggling firms in the industry, is now in need of a bailout himself.

Posted Updated

By
Allison Morrow
, CNN Business
CNN — Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto entrepreneur known for providing a financial lifeline to struggling firms in the industry, is now in need of a bailout himself.

Bankman-Fried, widely known as SBF, started this week firmly in the realm of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $15 billion, according the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. After the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, in a matter of days he may find himself out of the club.

His most valuable assets were his stakes in FTX, the crypto exchange he founded, and Alameda, a crypto trading house.

The Bloomberg index assumes that SBF and all other investors in the exchange will be wiped out, and that FTX and Alameda will become suddenly worthless if they are bailed out by Binance. (Terms of that deal weren't known, and multiple reports on Wednesday suggested Binance was poised to back out of the deal.)

That would leaves SBF's net worth at about $1 billion — a 94% collapse and the biggest one-day loss by a person tracked by the index.

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