Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried may no longer be able to hold that title after an estimated drop in his personal wealth of 94 percent overnight, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Bankman-Fried was once at the top of Bloomberg’s wealth index, with an estimated net worth of $26 billion at his peak. However, the crypto entrepreneur no longer appears among the top 500.
Bloomberg reported today that his personal wealth is ‘likely’ to be ‘wiped out’ if the sale of FTX to competitor Binance goes through.
Before the announcement of the Binance takeover, Bankman-Fried’s 53 percent stake in FTX was valued at around $6.2 billion. He also retained ownership of Alameda Research, adding another $7.4 billion to his personal wealth.
Bloomberg’s wealth index assumes that Bankman-Fried and existing investors will be ‘erased’ by the Binance takeover, estimating the two companies at just $1.
This means that Bankman-Fried is now worth about $1 billion, down from $15.6 billion on November 8 in the largest single-day collapse ever among billionaires tracked by Bloomberg.
Details of the takeover have not yet been disclosed, but it does not include the U.S. branch of the exchange, FTX.US. The U.S. subsidiary alone was valued at around $8 billion earlier this year.
The current agreement between the exchanges is merely a non-binding letter of intent that Binance can withdraw at any time, according to Bankman-Fried.
The FTT token, the original token of the exchange at the center of this latest crypto contagion, has fallen an astonishing 80 percent in the past 12 hours. The token was trading at $4.5 at the time of writing, a drop of 94 percent from its peak of $84.18 in September 2021.
