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

by Zeke Faux

He didn’t say so, but one reason he might have been willing to speak with me was that I was one of the reporters who helped build him up. After my trip to FTX’s offices in February, I flew past the bright red flags at his company—its lack of corporate governance, the ties to his hedge fund, its profligate spending on marketing, the fact that it operated largely outside U.S. jurisdiction. I wrote a story focused on whether Bankman-Fried would follow through on his plans to donate huge sums to charity. It wasn’t the most embarrassingly puffy of the many puff pieces that came out about him. (“After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire,” one writer said in an article commissioned by a venture capital firm.) But my tone wasn’t entirely dissimilar. “Bankman-Fried is a thought experiment from a college philosophy seminar come to life,” I wrote. “Should someone who wants to save the world first amass as much money and power as possible, or will the pursuit corrupt him along the way?” Now it seemed pretty clear that a better question would’ve been whether the business was a scam from the start.