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I will buy every book Michael Lewis writes. He is an incredible storyteller, and I enjoyed his latest work on Sam Bankman-Fried. Going Infinite tells about the wild rise of Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange and the company’s collapse. 

Lewis gives clear context and insight into the crypto currency industry while detailing Bankman-Fried’s unlikely ascension. Lewis’ access to Bankman-Fried during the collapse of the company is timely and fascinating. He spent most of 2022 following Bankman-Fried, and he wrote the book in 2023 as the collapse unfolded and court proceedings began. I appreciated the final section of the book which shows the bankruptcy and court-appointed takeover of the company.

Bankman-Fried is easy to despise. He is a weird dude who doesn’t operate by society’s rules or norms. He makes decisions based on how they will impact him, and he cannot empathize with others. Lewis shows why Bankman-Fried was able to use billions of dollars of customer money on one of his side projects and political ventures. The scale of the mismanagement of the company is colossal.

Quotes

“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.”

“Most neither knew nor cared about crypto; they had just bought into Sam’s argument that it was this insanely inefficient market in which they might use his Jane Street–like approach to trading to extract billions. They were now all living in Sam’s world, and they weren’t hiding their unhappiness. “He was demanding and expecting everyone to work eighteen-hour days and give up anything like a normal life, while he would not show up for meetings, not shower for weeks, have a mess all around him with old food everywhere, and fall asleep at his desk,”

John Ray (appointed CEO of FTX in bankruptcy) 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.”