Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the richest people in the world, running the crypto exchange FTX and crypto trading firm Alameda Research, until the whole thing came crashing down spectacularly in late 2022 when the companies went bankrupt - crypto’s a mug’s game, who knew?! Bankman-Fried was arrested on a whole raft of charges including fraud and money-laundering, of which he was recently found guilty and faces decades in prison at his sentencing in March next year.
Michael Lewis charts the young billionaire’s rise and fall in Going Infinite and, while I’ve enjoyed a few of Lewis’ books in the past, I wasn’t that impressed with his latest. Not that it isn’t informative or well-researched but the story itself is kinda dull and forgettable.
Bankman-Fried isn’t that interesting a character. He’s like most above-average intelligence kids: he doesn’t relate to his peers, excels from an early age, success follows success. He became an Effective Altruist - someone who earns the most money they can in order to give it away and help the most people - which is laudable and noble, but his alienation made it seem like he didn’t really like people on a personal level, which is an odd contradiction. He seems to have viewed people as an abstraction.
He’s socially awkward and claims not to feel pleasure - which is a medical condition: anhedonia. He mismanaged his companies with breathless recklessness and played video games like Storybook Brawl during meetings. He comes off as immature and unhappy - he’s obviously more complex than that, as most people are, but he doesn’t seem all that compelling a figure to centre a book around.
One of the investigators says that some people are born criminals and some people become criminals - Bankman-Fried is the latter. There remains some $6 billion missing and it’s suspected Bankman-Fried squirrelled it away somewhere - hackers can only account for so much. He certainly is a crook, now that he’s been convicted, but he still just seems like a dorky kid in over his head rather than some sinister villain. It is ironic though that he set out to be altruistic for humanity and ended up ruining so many people’s livelihoods who sunk their money into his business and never got it back.
The story of his downfall is similarly underwhelming, as most white collar crimes are: he took people’s money invested in FTX and moved it to Alameda Research and that’s wrong for the reasons explained in the book. It’s the same issue I have with anything this esoteric: it’s hard to really understand the concepts involved. Every time I have crypto explained to me, I get it at the time and then forget it the next day. I understood why these were crimes when Michael Lewis explained them but I’m having a time retaining it, and when I did understand I didn’t really care all that much. I suspect that even if my understanding of these concepts were rock solid, it wouldn’t make the book more exciting to read. He did some illegal stuff, he got busted, got it.
Lewis’ writing approach is a bit off-putting at times. Like in the first chapter where he writes the meeting between Bankman-Fried and Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, like a novel, when he wouldn’t know how the beats of the conversation played out or the body language in the scene. I don’t like this style in nonfiction - it feels inappropriate and false to impose your imagination when you’re meant to be reporting the facts.
I do like Michael Lewis’ books generally but he tends to lose me when he writes about the more obscure aspects of modern finance, like the high frequency trading in Flash Boys, and all things crypto like in this book. He clearly knows his onions though and he’s a competent writer, it’s just too much for a finance simpleton like myself. I was hoping there’d be more of a juicy story or colourful cast of characters amidst the financial complexities and there wasn’t either unfortunately.
Going Infinite is a decent account of Sam Bankman-Fried and what happened with FTX and Alameda Research if that’s what you’re after - Lewis will appraise you of all the necessaries. But if you’re looking for an exciting page-turner, this ain’t it.
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