Ben Delo

Ben Peter Delo was born in Sheffield, England. According to Delo, he was diagnosed with Asperger's at age 11, at which point he already had an interest in coding and mathematics. He was educated at Lord Williams's School and graduated from the University of Oxford in 2005 with a double first-class honours degree in mathematics and computer science.

After a summer internship at IBM, Delo was hired by the company. Delo began his career as a software engineer at IBM, where he was named as an inventor on several patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Intellectual Property Office. He went on to develop high-frequency trading systems at hedge funds and banks such as GSA Capital and J.P. Morgan, dealing predominantly in kdb+/Q. After working with IBM, he moved to Hong Kong in 2012 to work for JP Morgan, at which point he developed an interest in buying Bitcoin.

In 2014, Delo met Arthur Hayes and Sam Reed, and they co-founded BitMEX, a cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform which became one of the largest in the world. Izabella Kaminska at Bloomberg has described Delo as "the BitMEX co-founder most responsible for the perpetual swap's invention". In 2018, The Times reported that Delo was the United Kingdom's youngest self-made billionaire. As noted in a 2020 IPSO complaint, The Times removed a reference that he had been included in the 2018 Sunday Times Rich List. Delo and his BitMEX co-founders stepped back from their executive positions in October 2020.

BitMEX shut down its operations on 23 September 2026.

In 2019, Delo signed the Giving Pledge, pledging to give away the majority of his wealth during his lifetime. In 2020, he co-founded the Sheila Coates Foundation, which supports students with autism in Britain. In 2025, he funded the Ben Delo Fellowship at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In 2026, he gave £25 million to his autism charity the Sheila Coates Foundation, and pledged an additional £20 million to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

In early 2026, Delo donated £4 million to Reform UK. In April 2026 Delo announced he was moving back to the UK after the Labour government changed the law to put a £100,000 cap on political donations from Britons living abroad. In an article in The Telegraph, he wrote that England was his home and that "the biggest obstacle to national recovery is the entrenched self-deception of our elites". He gave a further £4m to Reform in early September 2026. Later the same month, he donated a further £36m to Reform, which became the largest donation to a political party in British history at that point; he said that the purpose of the donation was to "level [the] playing field" against the Conservatives and Labour. Initially, Delo planned to donate the £36m in monthly sums of £1m up until the latest possible future general election in 2029. He eventually decided to donate the full sum at once, reasoning that the UK government might try to limit mega-donations in the future.