Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

The mania for crypto recalled Rotterdam circa 1637, when a single tulip bulb traded for roughly triple the price of a Rembrandt.

Inside of three years, it appeared, Sam Bankman-Fried had created a business so valuable that his share of it implied that he was now the richest person in the world under the age of thirty.

“In a crypto landscape ridden with scams, hedonism, and greed, Bankman-Fried offers a kinder and more impactful vision brought forth by the nascent technology,” Time had written, the week before Sam stiffed them.

Once everyone who felt the need to run had fled, the Albany resort reminded me of New Orleans a week after Hurricane Katrina.

Completely tasetless and crude analogy; the incalculable human suffering and destruction of a city is how the post bankruptcy offices of FTX struck you?

Enraged, she marched up to the Orchid penthouse and confronted him. “ ‘It’s not possible,’ he said. ‘I thought you had at least a million shares.’ ” She had less than a quarter of that. “Sam said to me, ‘I never intended for that to happen to you,’ and I said to him, ‘It does not matter what you intended!’ ”

The bankruptcy team had located Caroline Ellison by phone on the Saturday after Ray became FTX’s new CEO. She at least had been able to explain where some of the wallets storing the crypto were stashed. Other than that, she wasn’t much use. “She’s cold as ice,” said Ray. “You had to buy words by the vowel. An obvious complete fucking weirdo.”

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,”

He had a theory about why Sam had thrown money around the way he had: Sam was buying himself some friends. “For the first time in his life, everyone ignores the fact that he’s a fucking weirdo,” said Ray.