SBF

Chapter 5A Portrait of Sam

SBF has a curly mane, a high‐energy affect, a certain jitter in his body language, and he is definitely not actually awkward as everyone portrays him—not really.

He's a geek, but a geek with swagger. He is not a nerd. A geek is someone who sees something super‐interesting in topics that other people don't. A geek can still be cool. Or at least charismatic, because a geek can still relate to others on a human level. A nerd obsesses on uncool topics as a substitute for social acumen. Those obsessions are the means by which nerds relate to other nerds. So a nerd can never be cool.

Sam's a geek.

But if people say he's a nerd, an autist, an awkward turtle, they do it largely because SBF wants them to. He constructed that image because he knows that there's an allure to those characterizations. But listen to him on any of the gazillion podcasts or interviews he's taken part in, and it's obvious that all kinds of people enjoy talking to him. He sucks people in, and he knows what he's doing when he does it.

That's the opposite of awkward.

Mr. Bankman‐Fried at a speaking engagement/conference in 2022. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images)

SBF is the son of two Stanford professors. Their family is said to have been supportive and intellectual. He went to college at MIT, where he studied physics. He worked for a time at Jane Street ...