Gary Wang

Early life and education Wang was born in China and moved to the U.S. when he was 8-years-old with his parents. After moving as a teen to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, he graduated in 2011 from Cherry Hill High School East. He attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, where he met Bankman-Fried in 2010. After high school, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied mathematics and computer science. At MIT, he was the roommate of Sam Bankman-Fried for three years, and he was a member of Epsilon Theta, a coed fraternity that also included Bankman-Fried. After graduating from MIT, he worked at Google Flights, building systems for the aggregation of ticket prices. When Bankman-Fried cofounded Alameda Research in 2017, Wang reportedly left his role at Google to join his former roommate in that business. Wang was a somewhat reclusive figure, per reports.

On December 18, 2022, Wang pleaded guilty in a plea bargain in the Southern District of New York to wire fraud and three counts of conspiracy involving wire, securities and commodities fraud relating to helping Bankman-Fried defraud FTX customers, for which Bankman-Fried was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.

As part of his plea bargain, Wang testified in United States v. Sam Bankman-Fried that "with some simple tweaks to computer code," he helped Alameda Research misappropriate as much as $65 billion from FTX customers and that he "lied about this to the public." He said he was directed to alter FTX's code between 2019 and 2022 despite knowing that it would give Alameda Research "special privileges."