Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk Named Among Worst Tech-Company CEOs of 2022

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) received the highest score in The Guardian’s list of the worst technology-company chiefs for 2022.

The publication gave SBF 10 out of 10 for the FTX collapse. Earlier, the U.S. prosecutors brought eight criminal charges against him, and lawsuits were also filed by SEC and CFTC.

On December 23, Bankman-Fried was released on bail of $250 million. The agreement did not require actual posting of funds, and his release was secured by his parent company in California.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, received the same score. On November 18, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud and deceiving investors.

Elon Musk was also on the list — the paper awarded him 7 out of 10 points. On October 28, the billionaire completed the $44 billion Twitter acquisition. Later he fired the social network’s team working on ethical AI and introduced a new content-moderation policy, which drew discontent from users.

In December, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin criticized Musk for a ‘path to authoritarianism’ at Twitter. The company’s new CEO held a poll on whether he should step down and pledged to follow the results. Of 15.5 million users, 57.3% wished for his resignation.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal also made The Guardian’s list. He had to leave the company after it was acquired by Musk.

Another figure on the list was Mark Zuckerberg. They noted Meta’s interest in the metaverse and the February stumble — after the publication of the fourth-quarter report the corporation lost almost 25% of its market capitalisation.

In November, Meta announced the layoff of 11,000 employees (13% of the workforce) as part of a restructuring. At that time the company for the first time in its 18-year history reported a decline in Facebook’s unique users.

Earlier it emerged that in July–September the loss of Meta’s metaverse-focused Reality Labs division amounted to $3.7 billion.

The founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos received 4 out of 10 from the publication. In November, The New York Times sources reported plans to cut 10,000 jobs.

Forbes included nine cryptocurrency projects in the ranking of the most innovative private fintech companies in 2022. FTX led the list, followed by NFT marketplace OpenSea and the blockchain platform Alchemy.

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