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  ==Early life==
  Benioff was born David Friedman in New York City, to a Jewish family who emigrated from Austria, Romania, Germany, Poland and Russia. He is the son of Barbara (Benioff) and Stephen Friedman, who is a former head of Goldman Sachs. He is a distant cousin of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. As an adult, he uses the last name Benioff, his mother's maiden name, to avoid confusion with other writers named David Friedman. He is the youngest of three children (Suzy, Caroline, and David) and grew up in Manhattan, first in Peter Cooper Village, then on 86th Street where he spent most of his childhood, before eventually moving near the U.N. headquarters when he was 16.
  Benioff is an alumnus of The Collegiate School and of Dartmouth College. While at Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity and the Sphinx Senior Society. After graduating in 1992, he worked in a number of jobs: for a time as a club bouncer in San Francisco, and as a high school English teacher at Poly Prep in Brooklyn, New York City for two years, where he served as the school's wrestling coach.
  Benioff became interested in pursuing an academic career and went to Trinity College Dublin in 1995, for a one-year program to study Irish literature. While in Dublin he met D. B. Weiss, who would later become his collaborator. Benioff wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett while at Trinity College, but decided against a career in academia after writing the thesis. He worked as a radio DJ in Moose, Wyoming for a year—mostly as a side job, which he mainly accepted to take a year in the countryside at a writer's retreat. He then applied to join the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Irvine after reading ''The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'' by Michael Chabon (an alumnus there), and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing there in 1999.
  In 2001, ''People'' magazine included Benioff on its list of America's Top 50 Most Eligible Bachelors.