Since becoming Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire, Ben Delo hasn’t changed. He lives in the same modest flat in Hong Kong he rented twelve years ago. His T-shirt cost a tenner. “I didn’t want to change too much too quickly,” he explains. “It’s like people who win the lottery. They quit their jobs, leave their partners, sell their homes and move away. Then they don’t have anything to get out of bed for. And five years later, they’re broken.”
We’re talking at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Britain’s only independent research centre in physics and maths. This breakaway band of scientists, who operate outside the university system, is a cause close to Delo’s heart. He has just funded a new post here.
If Delo is being good to mathematics, that’s because mathematics has been good to him. His passion for calculating and coding empowered him to co-found BitMEX, which became the world’s leading platform for cryptocurrency futures trading.
Go further back, and maths offered consolation during a sometimes difficult childhood. When I ask why he was expelled from not one, but three primary schools, he laughs expansively: “For being too clever, of course.” Aged four, Delo was asked to read aloud from a book he regarded as tediously easy. To make it interesting, he translated it into French. The bewildered teacher jotted down that Delo couldn’t read.
His parents, a teacher and an engineer, were embarrassed by the way their son put people’s backs up, unlike his sister. “At school they started introducing themselves as ‘Sarah’s parents’,” Delo recalls. “I just saw the world differently. I thought the world should meet me halfway.” The upside of this stubborn streak was a rare capacity for focus. At six, he started teaching himself to write computer programmes. For his first, he typed out the contents of a dictionary to automate the creation of anagrams. A later programme generated a fractal – a pattern that repeats at any resolution –known as the Sierpiński gasket.
Given Delo’s early interest in patterns and failure to pick up social cues, it’s little surprise that he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome aged eleven. At Lord Williams’ School, a state secondary in Oxfordshire, he received one-on-one attention in several subjects. But in maths, he was allowed to join the regular class. “That was the subject that interested me. And it was good to be challenged by algebra and probability. Until then I had done a lot of coding but no real maths.”
Delo went on to win a place at Worcester College, Oxford, to study maths and computer science. True to form, he couldn’t resist testing the rules. Learning that students had to wear a suit for dinner, he turned up in a diver’s wetsuit. He nearly got expelled for his use of BitTorrent technology, downloading and sharing films until a movie studio complained to the university. The college dons extricated him from the furore that followed, but it led to his peers voting him, not only most likely to make a million, but second most likely to go to jail.
After a summer internship at the technology giant IBM he received his first job offer. He later earned his spurs by grinding out high-speed trading algorithms for a couple of hedge funds, before moving to Hong Kong in 2012 to work for JP Morgan. It was around then that Delo started buying Bitcoin on the side, the new-fangled cryptocurrency in which, some said, fortunes were to be made. That was how he met Bitcoin trader Arthur Hayes, who wanted to build an online platform for trading not crypto itself but its derivatives. In other words, it would be a place where speculators could use their crypto to place bets on the future of crypto. Hayes needed Delo’s fintech skills to build the platform. Both needed a third partner, Sam Reed, to design the front-end.
BitMEX launched in 2014 – to deafening silence. “We assumed if we built it, they would come,” Delo recalls ruefully. “We built it. And they didn’t.” A year later, they were in such doldrums that Hayes suggested pivoting their site to trading used mobile phones. Delo and Reed dug their heels in. Instead, they started offering higher leverage rates, holding out the promise of higher returns, albeit at higher risk. The result was BitMEX exploded.
The Bitcoin traders of 2014 [had] been using horse-and-buggy. We gave them a Ferrari
Their secret was that, unlike many early crypto enthusiasts, they weren’t anarchists or libertarians. “We were financial professionals who knew what we were doing, and that’s why we smoked the competition. The Bitcoin traders of 2014 didn’t even know what a good exchange looked like. They’d been using horse-and-buggy. We gave them a Ferrari.” The first time daily trading volume broke $1bn is etched in Delo’s mind. The heady scenes that followed, combining genius and hubris, are like something out of The Social Network. After renting offices in the iconic Cheung Kong Centre skyscraper, they reportedly installed an eight-metre-long tank containing three blacktip reef sharks, costing $100,000 a year. “Have you found any proof of this shark tank?” Delo asks me. I admit I haven’t seen any pictures. “So, you have to ask, which is more likely? That the sharks were just a rumour? Or that our security was so good that not a single picture leaked to social media?”
One story for which there is evidence is the time – in a stunt Delo cooked up – BitMEX parked three rented Lamborghinis outside the 2018 Consensus crypto conference in New York. The three founders hadn’t driven the cars; Delo doesn’t even have a driving licence. The cars were calling cards: everyone knew they had arrived. Trouble was, this included the US authorities. “Doing the stunt in New York may have been a mistake,” Delo concedes with a wince. He’s referring to the 2020 legal investigation of BitMEX, and subsequent prosecution of its founders, which the Consensus incident may have hastened.
The background to their conviction is the way accelerating technology cycles were outstripping legislation: a growing pitfall for new technologies. That’s why firms such as Uber and AirBnB have occasionally moved in legal grey zones, while legislation filtered in. For a long time, crypto had no legislation at all.
Exactly how BitMEX broke US law remains a thorny question. According to Delo, when the company asked the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for a steer on governance, they got no reply. When the CFTC declared crypto to be a commodity, it was “without a consultation, without an act of Congress”, Delo points out. Crypto thereby became subject to a 1936 law “created for soybeans and onions”. Delo and BitMEX say that they reacted by ditching their US-based customers, the result being that their trading was no longer subject to US law.
Not so, claims the report by the US Attorney’s Office, which states that BitMEX merely “purported” to set up controls to prevent US trading, while in reality “wilfully” allowing it to continue. In 2020 Delo and his partners Hayes and Reed were accused – and in 2022 convicted – of failing to maintain adequate Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer measures. Each was given probation and a civil monetary penalty of $10million. Then last month, seemingly out of the blue, all three received pardons from Donald Trump.
Delo won’t comment on the case, or on the pardon, save to say it was nice to draw a line. He even denies that the case was a low point: “That’s like saying the weather was a low point.” I’m sensing this might not be a man comfortable owning up to feelings. Does Delo’s reticence have something to do with being on the autism spectrum? I’m not so sure. Aside from his directness of manner, which can be bracing, he doesn’t conform to the stereotype. He’s an affable guy, with strong features and a ready laugh. It’s more likely a facet of his Britishness, which seems all the more pronounced for the amount of time he spends abroad. During a recent Antarctic cruise with his family, he took part in a polar plunge into the icy waters. For this heroic deed, Delo sported Speedos emblazoned with the Union Jack.
Today, over his black Uniqlo T-shirt, he’s wearing a navy-blue blazer. The lapel pin displays the crest of Worcester College, which shows six black martlets, mythical legless birds that are eternally on the wing – a fitting emblem for Delo’s restless career. He wears the pin to show his loyalty to the institution that “mentored me, fought for me when I was up against the proctors, and pushed me to put my passion for mathematics and coding to use.”
In 2018, the first year BitMEX paid Delo a hefty dividend, he gave half the money to his old college, endowing teaching fellowships in mathematics and computing. He has also signed the Giving Pledge, pioneered by Bill Gates, to donate half his wealth. The causes he has chosen include the Sheila Coates Foundation, an organisation he co-founded in 2020, which has since helped 13,000 students with autism in schools across Britain.
There are contradictions here. A respect for and an irreverence towards institutions. A desire to see what he can get away with and how much he can give back. A scepticism towards rules, alongside a respect for their value. “A futures exchange is all rules. It’s all calculations. The whole thing is zero sum. Every long is matched to a short. Every profit is matched to a loss. If it isn’t zero sum, you’ve magicked money out of nowhere.”
I ask Delo if there is an organising idea behind his philanthropy, and his reply homes in on the truth, which he sees as under threat. Truth and certitude are among the appeals of maths, which remains one of his passions. A few years ago, Delo co-authored a paper on the infinitude of prime numbers, published in the journal The Fibonacci Quarterly.
According to Delo, who has no truck with political correctness, the truth now needs protecting more than ever. “The idea that there are true things you can’t say because they might upset middle-class people who are offended on behalf of someone else – autistic people simply can’t understand this. It makes no sense whatsoever.” His preoccupation with truth underpins the support Delo gives to causes such as the Committee for Academic Freedom, which defends the right of academics to say and study what they want. It also forms the basis of Delo’s friendship with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, who first rose to prominence as a defender of free speech.
Intriguingly, Delo reveals that he watched the Queen’s funeral in 2022 in the company of Peterson and his wife Tammy. The three of them, along with a handful of others, camped out overnight in Delo’s London office, which overlooks Westminster Abbey, so they would have a ringside seat. “There was some back and forth with the Metropolitan Police,” Delo remembers. “But of course we had every right to be there. They brought their sniffer dogs in and sniffed our sleeping bags. Then they said: don’t open your windows, or our snipers will shoot you. So I thought: fair enough, we won’t open our windows.”
That night, guests ate sandwiches and some drank whisky (“we were out of wine”), before repairing to camp beds. Next morning, they were ready. Delo remembers a surreal moment when President Biden arrived. “Biden was stumbling out of his beast of a car to make his way to the Great West Door and Jordan was taking a photo of Biden while grumbling about him, and I took a photo of myself, taking a photo of Peterson, taking a photo of Biden.”
When I ask Delo if he’s religious, he shakes his head. “The closest I will get to God,” he maintains, “is mathematical truth.” This is one reason he likes hanging out at the London Institute – and why, after this interview, he’s joining us for Friday drinks in our rooms at the Royal Institution in Mayfair. “I like your focus. No teaching, no bureaucracy, just pure research.” After a pause, he adds, “Also, you’re geeks.”
These weekly drinks, in rooms where Michael Faraday lived, are in the tradition of the Royal Institution, which has always been a meeting point for the Two Cultures: science and the humanities. This evening, for example, we’re joined by writers, musicians and entrepreneurs. In the background, the Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko plays the piano.
His seat at the keyboard is occupied a little later by Juven Wang, a physicist and the London Institute’s first Ben Delo Fellow. Finally, Delo himself takes to the ivories. The jazz he goes on to improvise, his eyes closed in concentration, doesn’t abandon the rules altogether. But sometimes, it feels right to make it up as you go along.
Thomas W Hodgkinson is a science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (lims.ac.uk)
