Ken Griffin’s Secret War on ‘Dumb Money’

By the middle of 2021, Sam saw that he could not sweet-talk regulators and at the same time have CZ as a big investor. If you wanted to be the teacher’s pet, you couldn’t sit in the back of the classroom with the badass in the leather jacket. The first thing every regulator asked for was a list of your investors, and personal details about them. “T

It turned out that Sam had nothing to worry about. In November 2021, Forbes listed his net worth at $22.5 billion, a notch below Rupert Murdoch and a notch above Laurene Powell Jobs. Twenty-two and a half billion dollars was roughly what you got if you simply agreed with the world’s leading venture capital firms that FTX’s crypto exchange business

About the same time that he was trying to decide whether to sink more money into Twitter, Sam was handing $450 million to a former Jane Street trader named Lily Zhang, to create a second crypto quant trading fund based in the Bahamas, called Modulo Capital. So far as Ramnik could see, Sam had told no one about that until he’d done it.

Coinbase, the exchange that serviced the greatest number of US customers, appeared willing to take more regulatory risk. It listed roughly five hundred coins, including some that the SEC pretty clearly viewed as securities, and its CEO, Brian Armstrong, took to Twitter to criticize the regulators for “sketchy behavior.” Coinbase itself had no excha