The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

Su Zhu and Kyle Davies met at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, part of the class that started high school the same week as 9/11. While lots of kids at Andover, as the top-ranked boarding school is commonly known, come from great wealth or prominent families, Zhu and Davies grew up in relatively modest circumstances in the Boston suburbs. “Both of our parents are not, like, rich,” Davies said in an interview last year. “We’re very much middle-class guys.” Neither were they especially popular. “They were both known as kind of weird, but Su especially,” says a classmate. “In reality, they weren’t weird at all — just shy.”

Zhu, a Chinese immigrant who had come to the U.S. with his family when he was 6, was known for his perfect GPA and for taking a heroic load of AP classes; he received the “most studious” superlative in his senior yearbook. He earned a special citation for his work in math, but he was far from just a numbers guy — he was also awarded Andover’s top prize for fiction upon graduation. “Su was the smartest person in our class,” remembers a fellow student.

Davies was a star on the crew team, but classmates otherwise remember him as an outsider — if they remember him at all. A budding Japanophile, Davies received top honors at graduation in Japanese. According to Davies, he and Zhu weren’t particularly close back then. “We went to high school together, we went to college together, and we got our first job together. We weren’t the best of friends all the way through, he said on a crypto podcast in 2021. “I didn’t know him that well in high school. I knew he was a smart guy — he was like valedictorian of our class — but by college we started to hang out a lot more.”

“College together” was at Columbia, where they both took a math-heavy courseload and joined the squash team. Zhu graduated a year early, summa cum laude, and moved to Tokyo to trade derivatives at Credit Suisse, where Davies followed him as an intern. They had desks next to each other until Zhu was laid off in the financial crisis, landing at a high-frequency trading shop in Singapore called Flow Traders.