FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried planned to buy Nauru and build apocalypse bunker - lawsuit

Source: The Guardian

Bankman-Fried planned to buy Nauru and build apocalypse bunker – lawsuit

Lawsuit filed against FTX founder, 31, includes memo that detailed plans to purchase Pacific island in case world came to an end

Maya Yang
Fri 21 Jul 2023 20.52 BST
First published on Fri 21 Jul 2023 19.59 BST

The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX exchange, had planned to purchase the small Pacific island nation of Nauru in case the world came to an end, according to a new lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by FTX against its 31-year-old founder and three other former executives, and seeking $1bn, included a memo created by Bankman-Fried’s younger brother Gabriel and an FTX Foundation executive. The memo detailed plans to buy Nauru.

The plan was to “purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a ‘bunker/shelter’ that would be used for ‘some event where 50-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs survive’” the memo said, referring to “effective altruism”, a philosophical and social movement championed by Bankman-Fried that tries to maximize the impact of charitable giving.

The memo also noted plans to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there”. It also said “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too”.

Nauru is a sovereign state in Micronesia, and has an area of 21 sq km and a population of approximately 12,500 people, making it the third-smallest country in the world. In the 1990s, Nauru became a money-laundering haven to the likes of the Russian mafia and al-Qaida by selling various banking licenses and diplomatic passports.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/21/sam-bankman-fried-nauru-bunker-ftx

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