Barbara Fried, the Stanford Law School professor and mother of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, will not be teaching next year.
Fried is mentioned in the course description of the Legal Studies Workshop class at Stanford Law, but she’s not listed as the instructor for the course, according to the Stanford course catalog.
She’s not teaching any of the other courses listed in her faculty profile next year either.
It’s possible Fried was already not planning to teach this upcoming year, as she is an emerita professor, a title given to about-to-retire or retired professors who are not required by the school to teach a class.
However, in the past several years she’s taught actively, and former students said she seemed to love teaching, regularly going above and beyond for them and opening her home to students.
Stanford Law School and Fried did not return requests for comment.
Fried was last spotted in the Bahamas in late November with her 30-year-old son, known as SBF, who hasn’t been accused of a crime but could face serious criminal charges.
Fried’s husband and SBF’s father, another famed Stanford Law professor, has canceled his classes for next year.
Fried is multifaceted: in a tweet thread about her that SBF wrote on Mother’s Day this year, he praised her for being an intellectual leader in the “effective altruism” charity movement as well as a published fiction writer.
3) She’s a professor at Stanford Law School, but some of her best work has been in philosophy, and in particular on consequentialism, which is at the root of Effective Altruism and has guided all four of our lives.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) May 8, 2022
In fact, many EAs knew of her work before they knew me.
The founder of large Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX, SBF was once worth $26 billion. But in November, the exchange collapsed and filed for bankruptcy amid allegations he mismanaged customer funds.
The parents also came under scrutiny when news surfaced that it seemed they had been provided a $16.4 million vacation home in the Bahamas from FTX.
The parents have said they are actively trying to return the property, and SBF said last week that “it was not intended to be their long-term property. It was intended to be the company’s property.”