Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

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.”