Nishad Singh was FTX's Director of Engineering and had a 7.8% stake in the crypto exchange.
The 27-year-old has been out of the public eye even as other top execs make headlines for their role in FTX's collapse.
Singh received a $543 million loan from Alameda Research, per bankruptcy filings.
Since FTX's downfall last month, one of the firm's key executives, Nishad Singh, has remained out of the public eye even as other top figures have ended up in the crosshairs of investigations into the exchange.
Singh was FTX's director of engineering, and had a 7.8% stake in the company.
FTX filed for bankruptcy protection last month, and investigations and charges against top executives at the firm are related to the misuse of customer funds by the firm's affiliate trading arm, Alameda Research.
"FTX Group's collapse appears to stem from the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals," John Ray, FTX's new chief executive officer said during bankruptcy proceedings.
While most of the attention in the media has been paid to Bankman-Fried, there were other executive involved in what prosecutors have called "one of the biggest financial frauds in American History," including Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang. Both have pleaded guilty to charges they defrauded investors and are cooperating with prosecutors.
Singh was reportedly one of few people who had knew that FTX was misusing customer funds, along with Bankman-Fried, Ellison, and Wang.
Singh's nearly 8% stake, which also included FTX subsidiary FTX.US, was worth about $572 million in March of this year. He previously received a $543 million loan from Alameda as well, according to bankruptcy filings.
"Gary is scared, Nishad is ashamed and guilty," Bankman-Fried told a Vox reporter after the firm filed for bankruptcy. "It hit [Nishad] hard."
Singh was a high school friend of Bankman-Fried's brother, Gabe. The former executive worked for a time as an engineer at Facebook (now Meta) before Bankman-Fried recruited him for Alameda, according to Singh's LinkedIn page, which has been taken down.
"In addition to building out much of our technological infrastructure and managing most of our dev team, his treatment of employees has earned him sole membership in our Slack group 'Kings of Kindness,'" Bankman-Fried previously wrote in a blog post.
Singh was likely one of the five coworkers that Bankman-Fried referenced as a billionaire, Bloomberg reported, citing an interview with the disgraced founder from earlier this year. In 2012, Singh also set the world record for fastest 100-mile run by a 16 year old, according local newspaper The Mercury News.
A year after Singh became FTX's director of engineering, he became a steady donor for the Democratic Party. He gave $8 million to federal campaigns of Democratic candidates in the 2022 election cycle, according to nonprofit OpenSecrets.
"Currently, I'm sort of lucky that I can get fulfilled in many ways at this job - one of which is doing something that's probably pretty good from an effective altruist perspective," Singh previously said in a podcast.
Singh could not be reached for comment.
On Thursday, Bankman-Fried was released on $250 million bail and was sent to live in his parents' California home as he awaits trial.
Grace Dean
Fri, December 23, 2022
Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother, Barbara Fried.
Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman are the parents of FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Fried and Bankman have stuck close by their son's side through the fallout from FTX's collapse.
Here's what we know about them.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cofounder and former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, is moving back in with his parents.
Reuters
Bankman-Fried, who faces multiple fraud charges tied to the spectacular collapse of FTX, was released on $250 million bail Thursday, shortly after he landed in the US after being extradited from the Bahamas.
As part of his bail terms, Bankman-Fried, who also cofounded crypto trading firm Alameda Research, is required to stay at his parents' home while he awaits trial.
His parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, live in a multimillion-dollar home in Stanford, in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to news reports and state records.
Zillow estimates the value of the five-bedroom home at about $4 million, while Redfin's estimate is $3.1 million.
Bankman-Fried's parents have stuck close by their son since he was arrested in the Bahamas.
Tom Williams/Getty Images
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on December 12. The next day, his parents attended his court hearing in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, where he was denied bail. They later visited the prison where their son was being held.
The Wall Street Journal reported the couple as telling friends that they expected their son's legal bills to wipe them out financially.
So what do we know about Joseph Bankman?
Stanford University.RuslanKaln/Getty Images
Bankman is a professor of law at Stanford University. He's described in his biography on Stanford's website as a "leading scholar in the field of tax law."
He's also a clinical psychologist, having earned an degree in the field from Palo Alto University. New York Magazine reported that he's offered lunchtime sessions to first-year Stanford law students on cognitive behavioral therapy and managing anxiety.
A spokesperson for Bankman told The Wall Street Journal that Bankman was a paid FTX employee for 11 months, in which time he worked on charitable projects, and was not involved in running the company.
Bankman helped FTX recruit its first lawyers, joined FTX executives in meetings on Capitol Hill, and advised his son as he prepared to testify before the House Financial Services Committee, The New York Times reported. Bankman regularly flew to the Bahamas, per The Times.
The Times also reported that Bankman organized an FTX event at Miami Heat's FTX Arena in March, where local high school students pitched business ideas to a panel of judges.
A tax-policy class that Bankman was set to teach in the winter quarter was canceled, and The Journal reported that he'd postponed the course to the spring. A reading group he was set to lead has also been canceled, according to Stanford's course catalog.
What about Barbara Fried?
Michael M. Santiago / Staff/ Getty Images
Barbara Fried worked as a professor of law at Stanford until she retired from teaching in September. Her scholarly interests were "at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy," according to her biography on the university's website.
The New York Times reported that Fried and her husband were popular faculty members at Stanford and regularly hosted dinners for colleagues.
Fried writes short stories and poems. She also penned a biography of the economist and lawyer Robert Hale and worked as a review editor for the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs.
Fried graduated from Harvard University in 1983, per her Stanford biography. Her first job after graduating was as a law clerk to US circuit judge J. Edward Lumbard of the Court of Appeals. She went on to practice as an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Fried joined Stanford as an assistant professor in 1987 and went on to win multiple awards for excellence in teaching. She also had stints as a visiting professor at New York University Law School, her biography says.
Fried cofounded Mind the Gap, a Democratic super-PAC, from which she resigned in November 2022, The Times reported.
Bankman-Fried's parents may have helped shape his interest in effective altruism.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Prior to FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried was a poster boy for effective altruism, a movement in which followers commit to doing the most good for the largest number of people using science, evidence, and reason.
Will MacAskill, an academic at Oxford University and a central force behind effective altruism, is said to have introduced Bankman-Fried to the movement. However, Bankman-Fried's parents appear to have had some hand in shaping his philosophical outlook.
An article published on the website of Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm, said Bankman and Fried raised their son on utilitarian beliefs, including family discussions about how to do the greatest good for the largest number of people.
Both have an academic interest in corporate ethics, and his mother has written a review of a book by Peter Singer, seen by many as the originator of the effective altruism movement.
Bankman and Fried have been tied to an FTX-linked luxury property in the Bahamas.
Barbara Fried.David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Bankman and Fried aren't named as defendants in the lawsuits filed by US regulators and federal prosecutors against FTX and their son. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission has accused their son of misappropriating FTX customers funds to purchase Bahamian real estate for various people, including his parents.
Reuters reported in November that Bankman and Fried were listed as signatories for a $16.4 million home in a gated community in the Bahamas, which was described in property records as a vacation home.
A spokesperson for Bankman and Fried told Reuters they'd tried to return the property deeds to FTX before the company entered bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried said last month that he didn't know the details of the property purchase.
Bankman-Fried has praised his parents for the support he's received since FTX collapsed.
Bankman-Fried said at The New York Times DealBook Summit that his parents "bore no responsibility" for FTX's downfall.
"Anyone close to me, including my parents and employees and coworkers, who fought with the company to push forward, they were hurt by this," he said."I feel really grateful for the support my parents are still giving me throughout all of this."
Huileng Tan contributed to this article.
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