Michael Lewis' new book puts a positive spin on Sam Bankman-Fried
I haven’t read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, but I find it difficult to believe that the author expressed much sympathy for those involved in the United States housing bubble prior to the 2008 financial crisis. By contrast, his account of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is relatively glowing.
In Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, published on Oct. 3, Lewis released many largely unknown details about the fall of FTX. That included SBF's attempt to pay former President Donald Trump to not run for the office again, and writing a list of pros and cons for former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison about their sexual relationship. But what stood out wasn’t the background about Bankman-Fried — it was the fact that the overwhelming majority of material focused on explaining how SBF’s brain worked with respect to money and his interactions with other people.
An entire chapter was devoted to SBF’s own motivations behind effective altruism: the idea that people should make as much money as possible in order to give it away and make the world a better place. But the term also seemed to be the theme of the book, painting a picture of SBF as someone who gathered effective altruists with little or no experience in crypto or finance to launch Alameda and FTX to framing them as crusaders working toward a noble cause — largely ignoring what was happening on the other side, with many FTX users losing their savings once everything came crashing down.
When FTX was forced to declare bankruptcy in November 2022, a lot of people were hurt, financially and emotionally. Some media outlets had portrayed SBF as a rising star who might one day bridge the divide between crypto and traditional
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