Gary Wang is an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is known as the co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO) at FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. He was a software engineer at Google prior to co-founding FTX with Sam Bankman Fried.^[1][2]

Prior to the collapse of FTX in November 2022, Gary Wang was considered one of the richest and youngest self-made billionaires in the world.^[3]

Education

In 2011, Gary Wang attended MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he studied mathematics and computer science, he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in math and computer science, in 2015.^[6]

During his undergraduate studies, he took part in a variety of technology projects, including coding his team's robot for MIT's Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory competition, and worked as an intern at Facebook.^[5]

Career

After he graduated from MIT in 2015, Wang worked for 2 years at Google as a software engineer. In 2017, Wang became bored working at Google and was persuaded to leave Google by his college friend Sam Bankman-Fried. They both worked at Alameda Research, a trading firm.^[7][8]

Together with Bankman-Fried, Wang founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and later relocated the company's headquarters from San Francisco to Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas, which has more favorable cryptocurrency regulations. He later cofounded FTX U.S, a sub-organization of the FTX company, which had a license to operate in the United States of America. Shortly after FTX was established, the company became successful and was worth 18 billion US dollars in 2021 and was worth 40 billion US dollars in 2022 before it collapsed in November 2022.^[9]