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Inside the Fall of S.B.F.’s Big Cool Buddy

The backstory to the yearlong back-and-forth between prosecutors and Ryan Salame, the Berkshires restaurateur and Republican mega-donor who fought the feds for as long as he could—before folding.

Ryan Salame always stood out as the linen-and-loafered bro among the Math Camp crowd that surrounded S.B.F.
Ryan Salame always stood out as the linen-and-loafered bro among the Math Camp crowd that surrounded S.B.F. Photo: Gillian Jones/The Berkshire Eagle
Theodore Schleifer
September 12, 2023

By last summer, the twenty-something billionaire crypto executive and emerging man-about-Washington, Ryan Salame, had been looking for a way out as a top executive at FTX. He felt exhausted by the long days, was anxious to spend more time in the U.S., and was continually butting heads with other FTX executives. In October, Salame finally pulled the trigger. His decision to resign was never announced, or reported, but it was more than a year in the making: He had been somewhat withdrawn ever since moving to the Bahamas in late 2021, in what was intended to be a “retirement” for one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s key deputies after amassing a miraculous fortune, before S.B.F. moved the entire company there.