Going Infinite Quotes

“A guy from Blackstone, the world’s biggest private investment firm, called Sam to say that he thought a valuation of $20 billion was too high—and that Blackstone would invest at a valuation of $15 billion. “Sam said, ‘If you think it is too high, I’ll let you short a billion of our stock at a valuation of twenty billion,’” recalled Ramnik. “The guy said, ‘We don’t short stock.’ And Sam said that if you worked at Jane Street you’d be fired the first week.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“optimal moves. It required skill, but also luck. It required him to estimate”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“W. W. Norton Special Sales at”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn’t, not really—which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“The mini city creators obviously had some questions needing answers. For example: “How many people will occupy this city?” Or: “What does Sam want his mini city to look like?” But Sam wasn’t interested in their questions, and by the time they arrived neither was Ryan. Ryan had moved back to the United States to help his new girlfriend run for Congress. The architects found themselves handed off to Nishad Singh’s girlfriend, Claire Watanabe—who had assumed Ryan’s role as spender of money and manager of support staff in the Bahamas. “We said just give us a list of the employees, give us anything,” said Ian. “Claire said, ‘I know it’s weird, but we don’t have any of that—even the number of employees.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“They worked in some regular company but on the side they had this interest. They wanted to talk about how they are afraid of government. A lot of times their spouse or their family didn’t want to hear about it anymore.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“That’s it for crypto explanations for the moment, as that’s about all that Sam Bankman-Fried knew about crypto, or for that matter needed to know, to trade billions of dollars’ worth of it. Plus, so many writers have taken a crack at explaining to a lay audience what a bitcoin is that it’s hard to see the point of doing it all over again. See, for example, Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.” What is curious is how elusive Bitcoin is, as a thing to understand. Bitcoin often gets explained but somehow never stays explained. You nod along and think you are getting it but then wake up the next morning needing to hear the explanation all over again.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“people don’t see what they’re not looking for. It was also true that they have a talent for seeing whatever it is they expect to see.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“(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.) And”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“We tried having some grown-ups, but they didn’t do anything,” he said. “This was true for everyone over the age of forty-five. All they did was worry. Here’s a classic grown-up thing: you freak the fuck out about a Chinese government crackdown on crypto in Hong Kong. Their job was to be serious about problems even if the problems were not serious. And they weren’t able to identify serious problems. They were terrified of regulators. Or taxes! Not that we wouldn’t pay it, but we’d pay too much, and then we’d have a loss the next year, but we’d already paid our taxes.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“A British venture capital firm oddly named Hedosophia called and offered to pay what Sam asked—and hand over $100 million for a 0.05 percent stake in FTX. Ramnik hardly knew who they were and so arranged a call with them. “It was weird,” he said. “I felt they didn’t know enough about the business. Basic shit like they didn’t know that FTX US existed.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“He hired a young saleswoman from the Huobi exchange named Constance Wang and made her the company’s chief operating officer. Faced with a necessity, Sam turned it into a virtue. “It’s a moderately bad sign if you are having someone do the same thing they’ve done before,” he said. “It’s adverse selection of a weird sort. Because: why are they coming to you?”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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. Outside the law, and often hostile to it, they discovered many ways to run afoul of it. Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers’ money. Crypto exchanges routinely faked trading data to make it seem as though far more trading had occurred on them than actually had.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“It’s because of the impact on their own lives. They believe that having kids takes away from their ability to have impact on the world.” After all, in the time it took to raise a child to become an effective altruist, you could persuade some unknowably large number of people who were not your children to become effective altruists.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.*”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“It is crazy,” she said. “He made me try to believe it was an accounting error.” She didn’t know how or why he had consciously decided to take customers’ money and use it as his own, but she felt sure he had.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“From its founding in the spring of 2019 until July 2021, when it finally persuaded a bank in San Diego called Silvergate Capital¶ to open an account in its name, FTX had no straightforward way to accept dollar deposits. In Sam’s telling, the dollars sent in by customers that had accumulated inside of Alameda Research had simply never been moved. Until July 2021, there was no other place to put them, as FTX had no US dollar bank accounts. They’d been listed on a dashboard of FTX’s customer deposits but remained inside Alameda’s bank accounts. Sam also claimed that, right up until at least June 2022, this fact, which others now found so shocking, hadn’t attracted his attention. He wasn’t managing Alameda Research; Caroline was.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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. Everyone agreed that these shares were the finest possible investment. Right up to the very end, the world’s most famous venture capitalists had been clamoring to buy them, at a higher price than employees were asked to pay. “Sam decides how many each employee is allowed to buy,” said Constance. “Most everyone maxed out.” She’d maxed out herself, but she’d never really known what that meant. When she’d come upon this document, her eyes had naturally searched for the number alongside her own name: 0.04 percent. Not 4 percent; not four-tenths of 1 percent: four one hundredths of 1 percent.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“Instead, FTX had simply loaned Alameda all of the high-frequency traders’ deposits . . . for free!”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“An outfit called the Apollo Academic Surveys, using FTX money, had created a mechanism to quickly determine what expert consensus was on any topic. Oddly, only economics had such a tool.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“In 2017, cryptocurrency had gone from being this bizarre hobbyhorse in which he had zero interest to a semi-serious financial market, entirely separate from other financial markets. That year alone, the value of all crypto boomed, going from $15 billion to $760 billion.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“It was never clear where Alameda Research stopped and FTX started. Legally separate companies, they were both owned by the same person. They occupied the same big room on the twenty-sixth floor of an office building. They shared the same vista of the forest of high-rises surrounding Victoria Harbor and, twenty miles beyond that, China.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“Crypto was like the friend you’d made only because you shared an enemy.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon