A mighty fall: Sam Bankman-Fried loses billionaire status after Binance deal announcement

Crypto exchange FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried overnight lost his billionaire status on Wednesday after losing about 94% of his net worth.

Bankman-Fried's networth went from $16 billion to $1 billion after he announced that his firm FTX was being bought by its rival Binance on Tuesday.

The 30-year old billionaire held a 53% stake in FTX that was worth $6.2 billion, while another $7.4 billion of his fortune came from his crypto trading house, Alameda Research, according to Bloomberg.

This is the biggest fall in net worth recorded in recent times. Prior to this, Meta's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had lost about $29 billion on Feburary 3 but maintained a net worth of about $84.3 billion that day.

Another such instance was with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in November 2021 when  he lost about $50 billion in just two days shortly after conducting a Twitter poll about if he should sell 10% of his stake in the company.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Bankman-Fried's losses come in the wake of a massice $600 billion crypto crash this year. On the other hand, another billionaire to incur big losess due to crypto crash was Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. He lost about $74.9 billion.