Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

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 ...