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June 19 - June 22, 2025
He’d asked around about Sam and discovered that, as little as he felt he really knew him, other people, even people who had invested millions of dollars in Sam’s company, knew even less.
people often are. He wasn’t braggy. He had opinions, but he didn’t seem to expect his listener to share them, and he pretended to listen to mine even when what I was saying clearly didn’t interest him.
Everything here is five times, she thought. Five times more work, five times more growth, five times more money, five times more responsibility.
No one came out and said that you had to work all the time, or that there was no room for a life outside work, but anyone at FTX who tried to live a normal life simply didn’t stick.
The Forbes wealth analysts had always tried to keep things simple: your assets were worth only what other people were willing to pay for them.
The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.
She could never be upset with him for the mess he left for her to clean up, because she knew that he never intended to make a mess.
None of what the Bankman-Frieds did was for show; they weren’t that kind of people. They just really thought about what they did before they did it.
From the widespread belief in God, and Santa, Sam drew a conclusion: it was possible for almost everyone to be self-evidently wrong about something. “Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out,”
He simply came to terms with the fact that the world could be completely wrong about something, and he could be completely right. There could be a kind of equilibrium in which everyone in the world could remain wrong and he could remain right, and neither side would even try to change the other’s mind.
Every life is defined not just by what happens in it but by what doesn’t.
What were the odds of a mathematically gifted kid in the middle of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s not picking up The Fountainhead and finding his inner life inside? But that never happened.
“The demographics of who this appeals to are the demographics of a physics PhD program,” he said. “The levels of autism ten times the average. Lots of people on the spectrum.”
“I don’t feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be.”
People able to calculate the expected value of complicated financial gambles were the same people drawn to the belief that they could calculate the expected value of their entire lives.
Crypto was like the friend you’d made only because you shared an enemy. The sort of person drawn to it, at least in the beginning, was the sort of person suspicious of big banks and governments and other forms of institutional authority.
As it turned out, the people who set out to eliminate financial intermediaries simply created some new ones of their own, including, by early 2019, two hundred fifty-four crypto exchanges.
The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system.
In traditional finance, founded on principles of trust, no one really had to trust anyone. In crypto finance, founded on a principle of mistrust, people trusted total strangers with vast sums of money.
He went from being a person you’d be surprised to learn approves of you to a person you’d be surprised to learn that, actually no, he doesn’t.
“The smartest minds of our generation are either buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an ad,” he said. “This is the tragedy of our generation.”
