I often see this on news items, but at some point I realized that these names could have been semi-jokingly made up by the video editors who simply didn't have a name to put in the clip (or perhaps they used a placeholder name that never got fixed).

Yup. Sam Bankman-Fried. His middle name was his chosen avocation.

His vocation, immediately followed by his dramatic downfall.

or change their name to be on brand and disassociate from their unremarkable upbringing?

Interesting, because a Google search doesn’t bring up his name until about 2019.

I would assume the original name would be captured on a university convocation program PDF within the last decade or two.