Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

“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.”

They thought he needed to learn how to read other people. Sam believed the opposite was true. “I read people pretty well,” he said. “They just didn’t read me.”

“That’s where I learned what the law is,” said Nishad. “The law is what happens, not what is written.”

“You have a close friend, Bob,” he explained. “He’s great. You love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someone. But you can’t say that there is a zero chance Bob killed someone. Someone got killed, no one knows who did it. You now think there’s like a one percent chance Bob did it. How do you see Bob now? What is Bob to you? And there is no updating: there is no new information about Bob.” One answer was that you should never go near Bob again. There might be a 99 percent chance that Bob is the saint you always thought him to be, but if you’re wrong, you’re dead. Treating Bob’s character as a matter of probability felt problematic. Bob was either a cold-blooded killer or he wasn’t. Whatever probability you assigned before you found out the truth about Bob would appear, after the fact, unfair and even absurd. “There doesn’t exist a guess you can make that is overwhelmingly likely to be roughly correct,” said Sam.

They needed to make hay while the sun shone.

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.

How did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior.

“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.”

Even if the VCs didn’t all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn’t care what they had to say.

It had become a lot less interested in saving the lives of existing human beings than future ones. In early 2020, movement cofounder Toby Ord had published a book, The Precipice, which laid out where his thinking (and that of everyone in the penthouse) had been for a while now. In it he offered up rough estimates of the likelihood of various existential risks to humanity.

Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn’t really register the damage he’d caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. “He has absolutely zero empathy,” she said. “That’s what I learned that I didn’t know. He can’t feel anything.”

“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 wrote.

Ray was inching toward an answer to the question I’d been asking from the day of the collapse: Where did all that money go? The answer was: nowhere. It was still there.