Who is Tiffany Fong? Meet the Crypto Influencer in the Center of Sam

Photograph by Ye Fan

Tiffany Fong stood among a gaggle of reporters in the gray tiled plaza of Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. It was just past dawn, but members of the media were already queued up for the start of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial. Fong, 29, took periodic hits from her vape while chatting up reporters, doling out her number and self-deprecating one-liners for stories. She looked like a grown-up version of a former college “it” girl, wearing a black sweater vest, Nike Air Force One sneakers and a leather blazer tied around her petite waist. She whipped out her phone and started vlogging, documenting the experience for her legion of over 90,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) and 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

Fong, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a “reluctant crypto content creator.” (She cringes at the term “influencer.”) She’d flown to New York City to attend Bankman-Fried’s trial in person at the Southern District courthouse. Bankman-Fried, who faces over a century in prison, has been charged with seven counts related to fraud. (He has pleaded not guilty.) But unlike other spectators, Fong has visited Bankman-Fried more than 10 times at his childhood home in Palo Alto during his months of house arrest. The pair spent dozens of hours alone in his parents’ study. He introduced her to his childhood stuffed bunny, Manfred. 

During that period, she temporarily moved to San Francisco to be within commuting distance of Bankman-Fried. Fong’s access is perhaps only rivaled by the author Michael Lewis, who spent hundreds of hours with Bankman-Fried for the book “Going Infinite,” an account of the crypto wunderkind’s rise and fall. (Since Bankman-Fried has been jailed and unreachable during his trial, this story of their months-long back-and-forth is told through Fong’s experience. A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.) 

“This is the weirdest little detour my life has taken, getting a front row seat to a massive financial fraud scandal,” Fong tells me in her Airbnb studio rental in downtown Manhattan, where I interview her on the eve of the trial. She sits cross-legged on the bed, showing me the new plastic vapes she hoped wouldn’t set off the metal detectors at the courthouse entrance. I first met Fong at a crypto conference in March, during a nightclub afterparty where the ratio of men to women approached that of a men’s locker room. I’d listened to Fong’s November interviews with Bankman-Fried from before his arrest, when he was telling anyone who’d listen that the collapse was due to a colossal failure of risk management, not fraud. “I’m so out of place in this story,” admits Fong. “It’s just like this random fucking chick wandered into this very serious situation.” 

FONG GREW UP IN LAS VEGAS, to divorced parents, as one of the only Asian students in her school. In elementary school, she was painfully shy to the point where a teacher called her mom expressing concern that Fong wasn’t speaking enough. After a concerted effort to become more outgoing, Fong was eventually voted “life of the party” her senior year of high school. She graduated from the University of Southern California, where she was a self-professed party girl. 

Fong briefly considered working in entertainment law or public relations, but found the prospect of a corporate job stifling. “I just had an existential crisis,” Fong says. “If I take one of these jobs, then I get what, like two weeks off a year? I’m basically someone’s bitch for the rest of my life.” Instead, Fong backpacked all over the world for almost three years. To make money, she started small online businesses — like selling digital files and on-demand printing. “I haven’t actually worked a real serious, nine-to-five job,” she says. “I don’t like the idea of answering to anybody.” The Covid-19 pandemic ended her travels. Then the crypto bull market began. 

Fong made her name in the crypto community last year because of what she refers to as her “Celsius leaks.” In 2011, when a single bitcoin was worth under $100 a coin, Fong was gifted a bitcoin by a relative who dabbled in bitcoin mining. Over the years, she received two more. She never sold them. In spring 2021, with bitcoin trading as high as $60,000, she put more than $200,000 worth of bitcoin and other crypto in a startup called Celsius, a kind of shadow bank that…