Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

Back in Palo Alto, he was sleeping in his childhood bedroom, and he was bored. He started a Substack newsletter, where he wrote a lengthy explanation of FTX’s failure, complete with eight charts, which attempted to deflect much of the blame to Binance’s CZ. After Bankman-Fried used a VPN—a service to conceal the user’s location—to access a streaming service to watch the Super Bowl, he was reprimanded by the judge in his case, who eventually forced him to give up his smartphone, and made his parents pledge not to allow him to use the internet on theirs. The Bankman-Frieds purchased a trained German shepherd attack dog, named Sandor. They hired armed guards, at $10,000 a week, after receiving death threats. The guards set up a barrier on their street. His lawyers claimed in court that one day a car drove into it. Three men got out and said, “You won’t be able to keep us out.” They left before they could be identified. Among his visitors were the author Michael Lewis; reporters from Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, Forbes, and Puck; and a twenty-eight-year-old crypto influencer named Tiffany Fong. Bankman-Fried told them he was lonely and understimulated. In his den, Bankman-Fried had a marble table with two chess sets set up side by side for Bughouse chess, one of the games he used to stay up all night playing with his FTX friends. He told one of his visitors he had no one to play with. “It is sort of there prospectively as much as anything else,” he told a reporter. —