Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

By the end of this walk I was totally sold. I called my friend and said something like: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong? It was only later that I realized I hadn’t even begun to answer his original question: Who was this guy?

The businesses themselves didn’t always know what they were doing, or why. They were hiring lots of people because they could afford to, and big headcounts signaled their importance.

In addition to the crypto exchange, FTX, Sam also owned and controlled a crypto quant trading firm called Alameda Research.

after he’d met privately with President Clinton, and asked him what the United States might do if China invaded Taiwan. Whatever Clinton had told Sam had prompted him to seek her out afterward and suggest that she move her parents out of Taiwan.

His bare left leg now curled under his bottom on the hotel desk chair; his right heel, encased in a white athletic sock, bounced up and down off the hotel carpet. He looked less like a crypto tycoon than a first grader who needed to pee.

“In a crypto landscape ridden with scams, hedonism, and greed, Bankman-Fried offers a kinder and more impactful vision brought forth by the nascent technology,” Time had written, the week before Sam stiffed them.

“I’m a little confused about my childhood,” he said. “I just can’t figure out what I did with it. I look at the things I did, and I cannot successfully add up to twenty-four hours a day.

He thought of Santa roughly the same way he thought of cartoon characters. Bugs Bunny existed too, in some sense, but Bugs Bunny wasn’t real.

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 some deep way, he sensed, he remained cut off from other human beings.

“There were some things I had to teach myself to do,” he said. “One is facial expressions. Like making sure I smile when I’m supposed to smile. Smiling was the biggest thing that I most weirdly couldn’t do.”

There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it.

None of the Jane Street games were even games, exactly, so much as games within games, or games about games.

Australian philosopher named Peter Singer.

essay, called “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”

“The whole way we look at moral issues—our moral conceptual scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society,” he wrote, in that first of what would be a lifetime of similar salvos. We needed to go way beyond ruining our new shoes. Eventually he came to the view that we needed to give what we had to others until the cost to ourselves outweighed the benefits to them. We needed to stop thinking of charity as a thing that was nice to do but okay not to do, and begin to think of it as our duty.

“Crudely stated, this argument suggests that if we tell people that they ought to refrain from murder and give everything they do not really need to famine relief, they will do neither, whereas if we tell them that they ought to refrain from murder and that it is good to give to famine relief but not wrong not to do so, they will at least refrain from murder.”

The argument that MacAskill put to Sam and a small group of Harvard students in the fall of 2012 went roughly as follows: you, student at an elite university, will spend roughly eighty thousand hours of your life working. If you are the sort of person who wants to “do good” in the world, what is the most effective way to spend those hours? It sounded like a question to which there were only qualitative answers, but MacAskill framed it in quantitative terms. He suggested that the students judge the effectiveness of their lives by counting the number of lives they saved during those eighty thousand hours. The goal was to maximize the number.

He’d grouped these into four broad categories and offered examples of each: Direct Benefiter (doctor, NGO worker), Money-Maker (banker, management consultant), Researcher (medical research, ethicist), and Influencer (politician, teacher).

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.”

From the sums of money being extracted from the game—and the sums of money being handed by high-frequency trading firms to US stock exchanges for faster access to their data—you could see that an advantage of a few milliseconds was clearly worth billions a year to whoever possessed it. Whether the speed added anything of value to the economy was another question: Did it really matter if asset prices adjusted to new information in two milliseconds rather than a second? Probably not, but the new technology definitely made it possible for the financial sector to raise the rents that it charged the real economy.

Until it opened, Sam would be unable to buy Indian stocks and would remain exposed to any news that might affect the market. He’d need to consider the identity of the ultimate buyer, as some buyers were likely to have better information about Indian stocks than he did.

His unhappiness was not a simple matter; he was unhappy in so many ways that it would have helped him to create new words for the emotion, the way the Inuit supposedly create all sorts of words for ice.

“I enjoy my co-workers,” he wrote, “but they show no interest in seeing who I really am, in hearing the thoughts I hold back. The more honest I try to make our friendships, the more they fade away. No one is curious. No one cares, not really, about the self I see. They care about the Sam they see, and what he means to them. And they don’t seem to understand who that Sam is—a product of thoughts that I decide people should hear. My real-life twitter account.”

He’d given away most of the money he’d made on the trading floor to three charities identified by the Oxford philosophers as being especially efficient at saving lives. (Two of those charities, 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Oxford philosophers had started themselves. The third was the Humane League.)

I had a feeling that if he really knew me deeply, he wouldn’t want to be with me, and thus I needed to hide myself,”

“He did zero management and thought that if people had any questions, they should just ask him. Then in his one-on-ones with people, he’d play video games.”

“I show up at their apartment,” recalled Nishad. “It’s just Sam and Gary and Tara. They show me this thing. Sam was like, Watch me make these trades. He makes a few clicks and says, I just made forty thousand dollars. I was like, ‘Holy shit! This is real?’”

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

Ripple’s actual appeal was the same as Bitcoin’s: the price of its coin moved up and down a lot, and so it was fun to gamble on.

She listed the things Sam had done that bothered her, among them giving off “confusing signals, e.g telling me that he felt conflicted about having sex with me, then having sex with me, then ignoring me for a few months.”

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.

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.

“Fault is just a construct of human society. It serves different purposes for different people. It can be a tool to discourage bad actions; an attempt to recover pride in the face of hardship, an outlet for rage, and many more things. I guess maybe the most important definition—to me, at least—is how did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior?”

How did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior. The sentence told you a lot about how Sam viewed other people, and maybe himself too. Not as fixed characters—good or bad, honest or false, brave or cowardly—but as a probability distribution around some mean. People were neither the worst nor the best thing they’d ever done.

“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.”

I have a long history of getting bored and claustrophobic.

I make people sad. Even people who I inspire, I don’t really make happy. And people who I date—it’s really harrowing. It really fucking sucks, to be with someone who (a) you can’t make happy, (b) doesn’t really respect anyone else, (c) is constantly thinking really offensive things, (d) doesn’t have time for you, and (e) wants to be alone half the time.

“It doesn’t really start with people,” said George. “It starts with suffering. It’s about preventing suffering. They care about animals in the same way. They also care about not having the earth blown up by an asteroid. But it’s not a longing for a connection.”

In early 2020, movement cofounder Toby Ord had published a book, The Precipice,

a keepsake box. It surprised him. He hadn’t known that Sam had the sentiment in him. He opened it. It had very little inside. A few medals from high school math competitions. A copy of Forbes magazine, with Sam’s face on the cover. And a box of business cards, from his time at Jane Street Capital.

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.

Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.”