Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

As Anna Wintour began to speak, he clicked a button and she vanished from his screen. In her place popped his favorite video game, Storybook Brawl. He had only a few seconds to choose his character. He picked the Hoard Dragon. The Hoard Dragon was maybe Sam’s favorite hero to play. “Yup,” said Sam,

The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything.

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 said.

And crypto lol

Even the employees who weren’t all that good at their jobs were kept on and made to feel a part of things. “Jane Street never fired people,” said Sam. “It was cheaper to pay them to do nothing than to allow them to take trades to a competitor.”

“It was borderline illegal, but in practice, who goes after you when you do this?” said Nishad later. “No one.” This was the very beginning of Nishad’s financial education: there were laws that, in theory, governed money; and then there was what people actually did with money. “That’s where I learned what the law is,” said Nishad. “The law is what happens, not what is written.”

there were laws that, in theory, governed money; and then there was what people actually did with money. “That’s where I learned what the law is,” said Nishad. “The law is what happens, not what is written.”

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.

“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.”

In their quest to understand this strange new company, the architects nagged enough people that finally someone sent them a note with what they’d asked for in the first place: a list of what Sam Bankman-Fried wanted in his corporate mini city. “There were only three things on it,” said Ian. Sam wanted the building shaped like an F, for the benefit of the people in the planes descending into Lynden Pindling International Airport. He wanted the side of the building to evoke his unruly hair. Unlikely as that sounded, Ian thought that it was just possible—they could use CNC cut aluminum to abstractly mimic what he was now calling “Sam’s Jewfro.” “It wasn’t actually a bad idea,” said Ian. The third and final item on the list of Sam’s desires was the tungsten cube. The tungsten cube was a bit of a head-scratcher. The imaginations of crypto people everywhere, it turned out, had been gripped by tungsten cubes. Tungsten, the architects now learned, was the planet’s trendiest dense metal. Crypto people were then memeing about “the intensity of the density.” A company in the Midwest had supposedly created the world’s biggest tungsten cube. A mere fourteen inches, it had cost a quarter of a million dollars and weighed two thousand pounds. Sam had apparently ordered up such a cube, flown it into the Bahamas, and wanted it displayed on a plinth in his mini city. The architects never were shown Sam’s dense and precious cube, but they nevertheless incorporated it into their drawings. “We ...

there couldn’t be many other cases in human history of a person his age tossing around dollars in the amounts he was tossing them without much adult supervision, or the usual constraints of corporate life. A board of directors, for instance. “It’s unclear if we even have to have an actual board of directors,” said Sam, “but we get suspicious glances if we don’t have one, so we have something with three people on it.” When he said this to me, right after his Twitter meeting, he admitted he couldn’t recall the names of the other two people. “I knew who they were three months ago,” he said. “It might have changed. The main job requirement is they don’t mind DocuSigning at three a.m. DocuSigning is the main job.”

I was only gone for a week or so. By the time I returned, Ramnik, along with pretty much the entire corporate org chart, had fled the island. Some meaningful percentage of the company’s fleet of cars had been abandoned, keys still inside them, in the Bahamas airport lot. It made for a bizarre scene: panicked employees of FTX and Alameda Research struggling to escape against an incoming tide of oblivious tourists in flip-flops and floral shirts. As they passed one another in the terminal, giant airport video screens flashed the message over their heads: Get Free Crypto Anytime, Anywhere. Download the FTX App. The day I landed, Friday, November 11, the signs on the airport walls were still cheerily pitching crypto—even though at four thirty that morning, Sam had DocuSigned the papers that threw FTX into bankruptcy in the United States.

Some meaningful percentage of the company’s fleet of cars had been abandoned, keys still inside them, in the Bahamas airport lot. It made for a bizarre scene: panicked employees of FTX and Alameda Research struggling to escape against an incoming tide of oblivious tourists in flip-flops and floral shirts. As they passed one another in the terminal, giant airport video screens flashed the message over their heads: Get Free Crypto Anytime, Anywhere. Download the FTX App. The day I landed, Friday, November 11, the signs on the airport walls were still cheerily pitching crypto—even though at four thirty that morning, Sam had DocuSigned the papers that threw FTX into bankruptcy in the United States.

He didn’t have Sam’s interest in How to Think About Bob. If Bob was Zane’s good friend, and Zane had no evidence that Bob had committed the unsolved murder, Zane would have insisted on thinking about Bob the way he had always thought about Bob. He would have gone out of his way to stand by Bob, and to make Bob feel better about what had happened. But if he’d stumbled upon Bob burying a bloody knife in his backyard he’d have shot him on the spot, without even pausing to update his probabilities.

The game still needed John Ray, however. The wild and wonderful world of US corporate bankruptcy was increasingly dominated by big law firms, but there were still a few of these lone actors, like Ray, who played the role of wildcatters. The law firms brought in the wildcatter to take over as CEO of the failed firm, and the wildcatter in turn hired the law firms. As a legal matter, at 4:30 in the morning on Friday, November 11, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried DocuSigned FTX into bankruptcy and named John Ray as FTX’s new CEO. As a practical matter, Sullivan & Cromwell lined up John Ray to replace Sam as the CEO of FTX, and then John Ray hired Sullivan & Cromwell as the lawyers for the massive bankruptcy.‡

Instead of grilling the people who had created the mess, Ray hired teams of hard-nosed sleuths—many of whom he’d worked with before. “Serious adults,” as he called them. The Nardello firm was a lot of former FBI guys. (Corporate motto: We find out.)

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. As an example, he cited the dollars Sam had invested in artificial intelligence companies. “He gave five hundred million bucks to this thing called Anthropic,” said Ray. “It’s just a bunch of people with an idea. Nothing.”

The odds of any accident were obviously hard to estimate. Lower than an asteroid strike, but surely greater than some artificial intelligence slipping its leash and wiping humans from the face of the earth. But it would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.