Former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay an $11 billion forfeiture for fraud and conspiracy relating to his fallen crypto exchange, FTX. He faced as much as 110 years in prison, though prosecutors asked for 40 to 50 years. The disgraced fraudster was once worth as much as $26.5 billion, ranked the 25th richest person in America, until his crypto trading firm went belly up in 2022, crashing his fortune to basically nothing.
The 32-year-old is now part of an infamous list of at least 11 billionaires and former billionaires that have served (or will soon serve) time behind bars, including Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin Guzman Loera, better known as El Chapo, and famous Silicon Valley convict Elizabeth Holmes, founder of blood testing firm Theranos. So far the longest time one of them has spent in the slammer is 13 years: In 2012, Allen Stanford was sentenced to 110 years for selling $7 billion of fraudulent certificates of deposits in one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever. He’s been in prison for 13 years and counting. Bernie Madoff, whose $18 billion fraud scheme was even bigger, was never listed by Forbes as a billionaire; Madoff, who died in prison in 2021, was sentenced to 150 years.
Here’s how SBF’s sentence stacks up against some other billionaire baddies.
S. Curtis Johnson
Sentence: 4 months
Behind bars: 3 months
Net worth: $4.5 billion
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A great-great-grandson of Samuel Curtis Johnson, the patriarch of the SC Johnson company, S. Curtis Johnson was charged in 2011 with the sexual assault of his then teenage stepdaughter. The initial charge threatened to put him in jail for 40 years, but following a three-year litigation battle and after the victim did not give up her medical records, Johnson took a plea deal. He pled guilty to fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct charges in exchange for four months in jail and a $6,000 fine. He served three months in prison. Johnson owns a stake in his family’s company, but has no involvement in the business.
Jay Y. Lee
Sentence: 5 years
Behind bars: 18 months
Net worth: $8.6 billion
The current executive chairman of Samsung Electronics and an heir to the Samsung fortune, Lee spent 11 months in prison in 2017 after he was sentenced to five years by a South Korean court for bribing the country’s then-President Park Geun-hye to support a merger between Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries. His initial sentence of five years was suspended, but that decision was later overturned and he was sent back to jail in January 2021. He served an additional seven months before being released on parole in August 2021.
John Kapoor
Sentence: 5.5 years
Behind bars: 3.5 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2019
The founder and former CEO of the now-bankrupt pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics, Kapoor was sentenced to five and a half years in January 2020 for conspiring to bribe doctors to unnecessarily prescribe his company’s fentanyl spray, Subsys, in a scheme that played a role in fueling the opioid crisis. In June 2023, Kapoor was released to home confinement, and then released from confinement in December 2023. Kapoor’s story inspired the Netflix film Pain Hustlers, released in October.
Thomas Kwok
Sentence: 7.5 years
Behind bars: 3 years
Net worth: $1.9 billion
Kwok is one of a small cohort who have retained a billion-dollar fortune after serving time. He and his two brothers, Raymond and Walter, inherited Hong Kong real estate investment firm Sun Hung Kai Properties from their father, Kwok Tak-seng, in 1990. Thomas Kwok co-chaired the company from 2011 to 2014 and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2014 for giving a $1.1 million (HK$8.5 million) bribe to then-Hong Kong chief secretary, Rafael Hui, in order to gain government favor. Hui was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for accepting the payments. Kwok was released from prison in 2019 after serving more than three years of his sentence.
Michael Milken
Sentence: 10 years
Behind bars: 2 years
Net worth: $6.5 billion
Milken became famous for fueling the go-go 1980s with junk bond financing from investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. In the late ’80s, an investigation by former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani led to Milken pleading guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations during his time at Drexel. On top of paying $600 million in fines, he served two years in prison, and was banned for life from the securities industry. Since his release in 1993, he has become known for his philanthropy, giving to a variety of causes, including prostate cancer research, being a survivor of the disease himself. He also founded and chairs the Milken Institute, an economic think tank known for its annual Milken Global Conference.
Elizabeth Holmes
Sentence: 11 years
Behind bars: 10 months & counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2017
Once the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire, worth an estimated $4.5 billion in 2014 when she was 30, Holmes has since become one of the highest profile cases of fraud in Silicon Valley history. The founder of medical device company Theranos, Holmes was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in 2022 for lying to investors about the capabilities of her devices, after she falsely claimed she had developed technology that could detect hundreds of diseases with just a drop of someone's blood. She has been ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to her investors, who include billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison.
Raj Rajaratnam
Sentence: 11 years
Behind bars: 8 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2010
Born in Sri Lanka, Rajaratnam made his fortune in New York after founding the hedge fund Galleon Group in the late 1990s. It rose to manage more than $7 billion in assets, before collapsing in 2009 on the heels of Rajaratnam’s arrest for insider trading. He was later convicted on 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy, and in 2011 was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Rajaratnam was released to home confinement early in 2019 thanks in part to Kim Kardashian, who lobbied for the First Step Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump and grants early release to some non-violent offenders who are over 60 years old. Rajaratnam was released from home confinement in April 2021, per the Bureau of Prisons.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Sentence: 13 years
Behind bars: 10 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2006
Platon Lebedev
Sentence: 13 years
Behind bars: 10 years
Net worth: Drop-off, 2004
Business partners in the Russian oil and gas company Yukos, Russian citizens Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were arrested for tax evasion in 2003 and sentenced to 13 years in prison each. Their initial trial was shrouded in political controversy; Khodorkovsky alleged that it was manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. After being slated for release in 2011, the oil tycoons were reconvicted on embezzlement and money laundering charges in 2010, extending their sentence through 2016. Khodorkovsky, who in 2004 was Russia’s richest person, was released in December 2013 after a pardon from Putin. His partner Lebedev was released in January of the following year. Khodorkovsky remains an outspoken leader of the “Russian opposition” and is active on social media.
Allen Stanford
Sentence: 110 years
Behind bars: 13 years and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2009
One of three former billionaires on this list who are still behind bars, Stanford, 74, is serving one of the longest prison sentences ever handed to a billionaire. In 2012, he was sentenced to 110 years for selling $7 billion of fraudulent certificates of deposits through the Stanford International Bank in the Caribbean island of Antigua. It was one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever committed. (Bernie Madoff, whose $18 billion scheme was even bigger, was never listed by Forbes as a billionaire; Madoff died in prison in 2021.) Stanford was required to pay a personal money judgment of nearly $6 billion, some of which was intended to go to the victims of his crimes and their families. Many of Stanford’s former clients reportedly have not received any money.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera (aka El Chapo)
Sentence: Life
Behind bars: 5 years and counting
Net worth: Drop-off, 2013
Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, is one of the most infamous drug lords in history. As the onetime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Guzmán Loera helped illegally move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. from the early 1980s through the time of his arrest and extradition to the U.S. in 2017, all the while evading law enforcement in two countries and twice managing to escape from Mexican prison. In 2019, he was convicted in the U.S. on 10 counts of narcotics trafficking and money laundering, and is now serving a life sentence. He was also ordered to pay $12.6 billion in forfeiture.
