Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

The schedule was less a plan than a theory. When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the other. All he had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time.

The schedule was less a plan than a theory. When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the other. All he had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time.

The funny thing about these situations was that Sam never really meant to cause them, which in a way made them feel even more insulting. He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations. With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time. “You’re always going to be apologizing to different people, and you’ll do that every day,” said Natalie.

The funny thing about these situations was that Sam never really meant to cause them, which in a way made them feel even more insulting. He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations. With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time. “You’re always going to be apologizing to different people, and you’ll do that every day,” said Natalie.

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.

In choosing a college to attend, Sam sought to ensure he’d never again be made to write an essay about Jane Austen.

He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people’s existence. He didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the Bankman-Frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. “We did a few trips,” he said. “I basically hated it.” To his unrelenting alienation there was one exception: games. In sixth grade Sam heard about a game called Magic: The Gathering. For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it. Magic had been created in the early 1990s by a young mathematician named Richard Garfield. It was the first of a new kind of game, designed, perhaps, for a new kind of person.

This was a radical notion: the game was ultimately unknowable. Merely playing a lot and memorizing the best moves only got you so far, as from one game to the next the best moves would change. “It makes it so players have to constantly adapt the strategy to things no one could have anticipated,” said Garfield. The people who were good at Magic were those who found it easy to adapt their strategies. As the best strategy was not just hard to know but unknowable, the people who were good at Magic were also comfortable making decisions while being certain that they were uncertain. Sam was good at Magic. Inside the game he interacted more easily with other people than he could outside it. Playing the game, he made his one meaningful childhood friend, a boy named Matt Nass.† Matt was as chill as a twelve-year-old boy could be. He had none of the neediness of other kids. “Given the backdrop of I don’t understand kids in the first place, neediness was a problem,” said Sam. Matt made zero social or emotional demands on him. He didn’t need Sam to generate facial expressions, or to ask him questions about himself, or really to do anything but play Magic.

During college lectures he’d experienced a boredom that had the intensity of physical pain. He had no ability to listen to a canned talk. He’d figure out where the professor was going with whatever he was saying and, bang, he was out. The more Sam saw of academic life, the more it felt like one long canned talk, created mainly for narrow career purposes. “I sort of started to look at it from a different perspective, and I got a little bit disillusioned,” he said. “There was very little evidence that they were doing much of anything to change the world. Or even thinking about how to have the most impact on the world.”

Sam thought time pressure favored him. It wasn’t that he thrived under pressure; it was that he didn’t feel it. He wasn’t better than usual when he was on a clock; he just wasn’t worse—and most people were. Other people felt emotions; he did not. Most people, facing a complicated problem and a ticking sound, had trouble seeing quickly what mattered and what did not, especially if the problem had no perfect solution. Few of the Jane Street traders’ questions had perfectly correct answers. They were testing him for an ability to make messy judgments and act quickly on them—and not to be too bothered about questions to which he did not, and could not, know the answer. “It was all the intuitive decisions you make in Magic, condensed down but even more complicated,” said Sam. “Even Magic does not get you there.”

Here things became tricky. The trader might have anticipated that Sam would have this thought. The trader might have intentionally asked a question that he had no special reason to ask, just to trick Sam. Here was just another aspect of the puzzle: you had to figure out how many levels down you should go before you should stop thinking. Sam decided, as he nearly always did, that more than one level down was too clever by half. It was far more likely that the guy had some reason to ask the question than that he did not. He didn’t know by exactly how much, but the mere fact the trader had asked the question shifted the odds that he had a relative who played pro baseball to something better than one in a thousand. “That was the other thing he was testing for,” said Sam. “Did I realize that there was information in the question I was asked?”

Earn to give, MacAskill called his idea. His final slide was an invitation: “If you are convinced to any extent by the arguments given above, please come up and speak with me afterwards.” Even before he was done, he knew the sort of person who’d be coming up to speak with him: the sort of person who scored an 800 on their math SAT, and understood that the test was too crude to capture their full aptitude. Like Jane Street Capital, the effective altruism movement had come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a reason. Roughly three in four of the people who approached MacAskill after one of his talks were young men with a background in math or science. “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.”

And Asher had approached him. In the conference room, one morning. Before Jane Street’s intern class. Let’s make a bet, Asher had said. On what? On how much any one intern will lose gambling today. Sam’s first thought was about adverse selection. Adverse selection was a favorite topic at Jane Street. In this context it meant that the person most eager to make a bet with you is the person you should be most worried about betting against. When people wanted to bet—or trade—with you, there was usually a reason: they knew something you did not. (That they had a second cousin who had played in the minor leagues, for instance.) The first thing you did when someone offered you a bet was to make sure you weren’t missing what they might know. Some piece of information. Some non-obvious angle to the problem. Lots of bets looked stupid after the fact because the person on the receiving end hadn’t thought about why a bet had been proposed in the first place. Jane Street hammered this bitter fact into you every day, and these gambling games were the tool.

There was a dance between financial markets and the people who worked in them. The people shaped the markets, but then the markets in turn shaped the people. The markets that were about to shape Sam Bankman-Fried had themselves, over the previous decade or so, been reshaped in ways that mostly reduced the sounds they made. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t exactly responsible for what was going on, but it had played a role. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that had once taken the most interesting trading risks had become clunkier and more heavily regulated. They were being shoved into the boring Wall Street role once played by the big commercial banks. The trading action had moved into a new class of private trading firms shrouded in secrecy.

The standard procedure at the firm was for the traders to watch the machines trading out of the corner of their eye while they ran little research projects. (The trading occupied roughly the same place in Sam’s attention that video games later would.) A trader on the international ETF desk, for instance, might start with the following question: When the price of oil moves during US trading hours, what happens to the ETFs filled with stocks of companies in big oil-producing countries whose markets are closed? If oil prices pop higher during lunchtime in New York City, the shares of, say, Nigerian companies will probably follow them higher—but the Nigerian stock market is closed. ETFs filled with Nigerian stocks, however, are live and trading on US exchanges. Perhaps these US-listed ETFs did not respond as quickly as they should have to movements in oil prices? Perhaps there is a chance to anticipate the rise that will inevitably occur in Nigerian stocks when the Nigerian stock market opens tomorrow? Perhaps others had not thought of this? There was no way to answer those questions without running a study of the historical price movements. Jane Street’s traders spent a lot of their time engaged in these financial research projects.

It wasn’t enough for the trader to make money. You needed to be able to explain why you were making money. A great trader at Jane Street was not a great trader unless he could explain why he was a great trader—and why some great trade existed. As one former trader put it, “It was, Why are you great, and how do we replicate you? And if you could not answer the question, they doubted you.” But these little research projects didn’t need to begin in a dignified way, with some theory about why some market might be inefficient. Often they’d be triggered by some weird event the trader had observed while trading. For example, you might notice, as Sam once did, that exactly twelve hours after the price of certain South Korean stocks rose on the Seoul stock exchange, the price of certain other Japanese stocks rose on the Tokyo stock exchange. Your first thought might be that this is merely a coincidence. But then it keeps happening. You dig into some old data and find that the same thing has been happening in these stocks for several months. You might trade on it—and buy the Japanese stocks the instant the South Korean stocks rise. You might even make money. You wouldn’t have satisfied the Jane Street system, however, because you didn’t know why the Japanese stocks were rising in price twelve hours after the South Korean stocks. And so you looked even further into it—as Sam had. And he found that the prices of both the South Korean and the Japanese ETFs were being driven by a single...

It was striking how few people left Jane Street for other Wall Street firms, or really for anything else. “When a sort of senior person left to go to a competitor, there was a crying and drinking session because it was so traumatic,” said Sam. The firm enticed young people who at any other time in human history were unlikely to have found their way to Wall Street and kept them sufficiently interested and engaged and well paid that they couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their lives except trade for Jane Street. They turned math people into money people without any obvious loss in human happiness. 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.”

To open a crypto account on a South Korean exchange, just for starters, you needed to be South Korean. “We found a graduate student friend in South Korea and traded in his name,” recalled Nishad, who now saw why maybe it would take Jane Street a while to export radical efficiency to crypto markets. Jane Street would smell legal trouble; Jane Street would at the very least be embarrassed if it wound up as news in the New York Times that they’d hired a South Korean grad student to front their business. “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.”

That sort of argument just bugged the hell out of Sam. He hated the way inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong. So much of what made his approach to life different from most people’s was his willingness to assign probabilities and act on them, and his refusal to be swayed by any after-the-fact illusion that the world had been more knowable than it actually was.

In late October 2008, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto—and who to this day, incredibly, has kept his identity a secret—published a paper that introduced the idea of Bitcoin. It was mostly a technical description of what would become the world’s first cryptocurrency. A bitcoin was an “electronic coin”; it existed on a public ledger called a “proof-of-work chain”; each time it was transferred from one person to another, its authenticity was verified by programmers, who added the transaction to the public ledger; those programmers, who would eventually become known as bitcoin “miners,” were paid for their work by being given new bitcoin; and so on.* (Interestingly, the word “blockchain” is nowhere in the paper.) How Bitcoin worked was interesting chiefly to technologists; what it might do was interesting to a much broader audience. It might allow ordinary people to exit the existing financial system and never again rely on the integrity of their fellow human financial beings. “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,” wrote Satoshi.

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.

Somewhere between Goldman Sachs and Facebook, Ramnik had given up looking for passion in his work. If he seemed older than he was, it was because he was letting go of one of the things that defines youth: hope. “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.”

she’d had two issues she wanted to talk about: her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her new and emotionally complicated polyamorous lifestyle. Every subsequent session after the first, Caroline came with just one issue she wanted to discuss: Sam. She’d fallen in love with Sam, Sam didn’t love her back, and that fact alone left her deeply unhappy. “I thought of her as an exception,” said George. “I thought she might be willing to trade EA for reciprocation of love any day.” George didn’t really see it as his job to explain Sam to Caroline or to dissuade her from her quest for his love. “If I was her friend—and not her therapist—I would have said you’re never going to get what you want from this guy.” It was still painful to listen to the steady drumbeat of her desire for Sam to publicly acknowledge their relationship. After nearly two years in Hong Kong, she’d let a few of their inner circle, their fellow EAs, know about it. “That’s the highlight of the relationship for her,” said George. “It was a big ask of him, and she seemed happy with that. It was an affirmation of the relationship, and it showed some level of commitment. She never got anything that big from him before.” After which Sam hopped on a plane to the Bahamas and never returned. And then, just a few weeks later, called George, and suggested that he move from San Francisco to the Bahamas and serve as corporate psychiatrist to FTX.

What Caroline would consider doing, and right away, was ceasing to sleep with Sam. She didn’t want to move out of their bedroom in the $30 million penthouse condo purchased by Ryan that they now shared with eight other effective altruists, including Nishad and Gary. It was Sam who needed to move, furtively, into a lesser condo in the same compound. Inside the company, hardly anyone other than the few EAs Caroline had shared the secret of the relationship with had been aware that the CEOs of FTX and Alameda Research were romantically involved. “People never see what they’re not looking for,” said Sam. Now they didn’t see that the romance had ended. Having hidden the relationship, Sam now hid that he’d broken it off, along with the fact that he was living in a different place than everyone assumed he was living. At that moment he was, in a funny way, making a truth of two lies. As it happened, it was the moment before crypto prices crashed. And also, oddly enough, the moment that I turned up to watch. § This is a footnote.

Here was yet another game. The game was for him and Nishad and Gary and Caroline to generate hundreds of billions of dollars and use it to reduce the likelihood of the grand experiment coming to an end. Like all the games Sam loved, this game was played on a clock. He’d somehow decided that the odds were low that he, or really most people, would do anything important after about the age of forty. If he didn’t sleep, or exercise, or eat properly, and always preferred action over inaction, here was why. He had to move fast. He didn’t think the later years of his own life contained much expected value. To do their bit to save the species, he figured they had maybe ten or at most fifteen years. As it would turn out, they had five weeks.

He’d quit on Tuesday. Now he was on his way to Miami, and from there he wasn’t sure where he’d go. Whatever trail he took, he wasn’t going to waste time on it trying to figure out why Sam had done whatever he’d done. To Zane it didn’t matter. There was one question he dwelled on: Why had neither he nor anyone else he knew seen this coming? He had the beginning of an answer. “Sam’s oddness,” he said. “His oddness mixed with just how smart he was allowed you to wave away a lot of the concerns. The question of why just goes away.”

Till this point, Constance had been calm and detached. It was as if she were inspecting the medical charts of a total stranger to determine the cause of death. When she arrived at the final document, her tone changed. She’d uncovered a complete list of FTX’s shareholders, along with the number of shares owned by each. At the end of each year, as part of her bonus, she, like other FTX employees, had been allowed to buy a certain number of shares in FTX.

There’d been only one serious revelation, she’d decided. Over and over, she’d confronted Sam with the suffering he had inflicted upon the very people who had been most loyal to him. A very short list of characters, topped by CZ and a few Western male former FTX executives, had exited FTX better off than they’d been when they’d arrived. Most FTX employees had lost their life savings. Some had lost their spouses, their homes, their friends, and their good names. There were Taiwanese employees of FTX still in Hong Kong who couldn’t afford plane tickets home. “I asked Sam: ‘When you were doing this, have you ever thought how much this event will be hurting people, and does that count as part of your initial expected value calculation?’ ” Even here, however, she found herself talking past Sam: in his telling, he hadn’t realized how much risk he’d subjected others to without their permission. 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.”

If the money was hard to find, it was in part because there was no person inside of FTX—at least no person Ray was willing to speak with—in charge of knowing where it all was. “There was no structure,” said Ray. “No list of employees.¶ No org chart.” Six days into his new job, Ray filed a report with the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. “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.

When we first met, in early 2023, Ray went on about how fishy these all were. 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.” A few weeks later, Google and Spark Capital and a few other companies invested $450 million in Anthropic. The terms revalued the stake Sam had bought for $500 million to $800 million. I knew at least one investor who thought that if that stake was broken up into smaller pieces and slowly sold off, it might easily fetch a billion.

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.

The authorities in the Bahamas had jailed Sam and after a lot of the usual Sam-induced complications extradited him to the United States. In an indictment brought by the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the US Department of Justice charged Sam with various crimes and then allowed him to post $250 million bond as bail. Sam hadn’t posted $250 million. Sam’s parents had posted their home and assumed the risk that he would jump bail—in which case they would, in theory, owe $250 million to the US government. They didn’t have $250 million. The prosecutors didn’t mind; they seemed to care mainly that the press report that Sam Bankman-Fried was still in possession of at least $250 million. Once that happened, lots of people who should have known better but who’d fallen into the habit of speaking without thinking took to Twitter to say that Sam’s ability to fork over $250 million made up their minds about his guilt. But most people hadn’t waited even that long. “Your son is a dirty, filthy rotten typical criminal hooky-nosed selfish greedy jew,” someone calling himself J. Revick had emailed Joe Bankman, the day FTX filed for bankruptcy. All the Bankman-Frieds received lots of messages like it. Joe had written back: “Isn’t Revick a Jewish name?” Mobs now gathered and sentiment now hardened more quickly than ever. From a distance, it was soon easy to make up one’s mind about what had happened inside Sam’s World, even before Sam had his day in court. From a ...

Sam now had a lot of time to think, and he spent a lot of it thinking about this. Human nature had always been something of a puzzle to him, but puzzles could be solved. He sat down to write a memo, very like those he’d written in response to Caroline’s. He was days away from a gag order being imposed by the judge presiding over his case, Lewis A. Kaplan, in response to a request from federal prosecutors. But for the moment, he was still allowed to share his thoughts. “People seem to have a really hard time having thoughts that go out on a societal limb,” he wrote, “even if they never have to say anything about them.” He followed this curious premise in the usual business memo–like manner: It’s almost always easy to criticize, even if you’re talking about something popular; nothing is perfect and you never really get punished for pointing out the bad parts of otherwise good things. And it’s easy to praise something that society praises But it seems like the thing that really scares people—more so even than the threat of jail—is acknowledging internally, to themselves, that they are an example of the person who society disparages.

As he wrote those words, he sat alone in a room in his childhood home. He’d come full circle. He was back to where he started, only he now wore an ankle monitor and was guarded by a German shepherd. Unable to afford security, his parents had instead bought this extremely large dog, named Sandor. Sandor had been flown in from Germany, where he had been trained to kill on command. The commands were in German, however, and while Sam’s parents had learned them, Sam had not. The dog was there to protect Sam, and yet Sam couldn’t generate the faintest interest in the dog. Joe had bought and read a book called Inside of a Dog; Sam still thought books were sort of dumb and better reduced to blog posts, and anyway he didn’t care what was inside of Sandor. And so when Sam was in a room with the dog, it always felt as if some accident was waiting to happen. Some terrible misunderstanding very like the misunderstandings Sam had with other people. 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.

Elizabeth Riley and Jacob Weisberg read and commented upon parts of this book. Will Bennett and Christina Ferguson researched crypto and other questions and helped me to understand my subject better than I ever could have on my own. Pamela Bain and Valdez Russell kept me looking forward to yet another trip to the Bahamas. Nick Yee taught me about games, and David Chee schooled me in Storybook Brawl. Janet Byrne is still somehow considered my copyeditor, but with each book her influence extends further into places that normal copyeditors never reach. And I owe more than I can express here to my editors, Tom Penn and, of course, Starling Lawrence.