Portrait of a 29-year-old billionaire: Can Sam Bankman-Fried make his risky crypto business work?“

Portrait of a 29-year-old billionaire: Can Sam Bankman-Fried make his risky crypto business work?

“I hope to never be as wrong as I was in that conversation,” says Adam Yedidia. He is reflecting on a chat he had with Sam Bankman-Fried, his close friend and former MIT classmate, in fall 2017.

Bankman-Fried was then inviting Yedidia to join him in launching a trading firm in Berkeley, Calif., that would specialize in buying and selling cryptocurrencies—digital assets like bitcoin (BTC-USD), ether (ETH-USD), and litecoin (LTC-USD). Yedidia declined, and even tried to talk Bankman-Fried out of the whole idea.

“I was sort of like, this crypto thing seems pretty scammy,” Yedidia recalls. “I was convinced it was a