Michael Lewis’s new book about the disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried began as an act of due diligence. In a story recounted in the first chapter, Lewis received a call in late 2021 from a financier friend who was considering a major deal with FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange. But the friend’s corporate counterpart was a cipher. Could Lewis check out Bankman-Fried, whom Forbes had just crowned “the world’s richest 29-year-old,” and report back?
Lewis met Bankman-Fried for a hike near Lewis’s Berkeley, California, home. He was charmed and puzzled by Bankman-Fried’s shabby-billionaire persona, the idea that a guy who looks like he just fell out of bed might control the future of finance. He was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s embrace of a philosophy called “effective altruism,” which called for him to make as much money as possible in order to then give it all away.
“He hadn’t been warped by money in ways people often are,” Lewis writes of a man who stands accused of perpetrating a $10 billion fraud. “His ambition was grandiose, but he wasn’t.”
Lewis decided that no matter what happened to Bankman-Fried, he wanted to be there to watch. He’d follow this “weird” guy around, learn what it’s like to make a colossal fortune out of magic Internet money, and write a book. As for his due diligence, Lewis tells his financier friend (whom he never names but is likely Brad Katsuyama, the C.E.O. of start-up stock exchange IEX and a character in Lewis’s 2014 book, Flash Boys) that he should go for it. “What could possibly go wrong?”
For the next six months, America’s pre-eminent nonfiction author shadowed the country’s most precocious billionaire. Entering the C.E.O.’s life with cosmically perfect journalistic timing, Lewis saw it all, right up to FTX’s sudden collapse in November 2022 and his subject’s arrest the following month. When Bankman-Fried was confined to his parents’ Palo Alto home, Lewis made regular visits and the two spoke more than 400 times by phone, according to prosecutors.
Bankman-Fried’s frequent conversations with the media eventually got him in trouble, after Judge Lewis Kaplan decided that his leaking of private writings by former Alameda C.E.O. Caroline Ellison amounted to witness intimidation. His bond was revoked and he was sent to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. Now Bankman-Fried is on trial in Lower Manhattan, facing seven federal criminal charges in what’s been described as one of this generation’s biggest alleged corporate frauds.
Lewis has called his new book, Going Infinite, which was published on the first day of the trial, a “letter to the jury.” The message of that letter seems to be that Bankman-Fried is a fascinating, mercurial, and misunderstood genius.
One might have hoped that FTX’s self-destruction—and the media’s well-established role in burnishing Bankman-Fried’s image—would have provoked some reassessment from Lewis, if not outright revisionism. Unfortunately, Going Infinite is a colossal misfire, a remarkable act of authorial misapprehension that completely exonerates its protagonist without giving a moment’s thought to his many victims.
Lewis goes so far as to suggest that the central crime in this case—the alleged transfer of billions of dollars in customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, where it was subsequently gambled away, spent on real estate, given to friends, secretly invested in start-ups, or simply lost—did not occur.
Or not exactly. The money was all “Sam’s money” anyway, and some of his investments spiked in value. It doesn’t seem to matter that commingling customer and company funds and lying about how one is using them—say, to buy your parents a $16 million beachside apartment—is illegal.
For a book that should be concerned with the crime at the heart of the story, Lewis gives the law surprisingly little consideration. Red flags, which are never lacking in crypto’s gray markets, are brushed off as the quirks of an innovative new financial system that few people fully understand.
Going Infinite is a colossal misfire, a remarkable act of authorial misapprehension that completely exonerates its protagonist without giving a moment’s thought to his many victims.
As Lewis tells it, Bankman-Fried concealed a list of his company’s venture-capital investments because it wasn’t “believable” that he could make so many acquisitions, and traded billions of dollars in crypto under fictitious names on unregulated Asian exchanges that catered to anonymous clients because “there was no upside to publicity.”
Sequoia Capital, a major venture-capital firm, invested $200 million in FTX, which Bankman-Fried, using Alameda Research, invested back in a Sequoia fund. Why? Because “it hadn’t even really needed venture capital.”
That last one, at least, should have set off Lewis’s alarm bells. He frequently calls Bankman-Fried “weird,” and it is very weird to receive $200 million and then send it back through another corporate entity. It looks a lot like money-laundering—which is, in fact, one of the seven charges Bankman-Fried is now facing.
This is a book soaked in paternalism. Lewis variously refers to Bankman-Fried as a kid, a child, a teenager, a baby, and “a first grader who needed to pee.” The older, sober-minded professionals who tell the unpredictable C.E.O. what to do—maybe hire a C.F.O. or keep decent corporate records—are dismissed as “grown-ups.”
Surrounded by “opportunists who had done very well off of him” and were now “turning on him without knowing exactly what he’d done,” Bankman-Fried was vulnerable, Lewis believes, because it was “easy to steal from” him.
A crypto novice, Lewis gets basic aspects of the industry wrong. He says that stablecoins are “meant to be” backed by dollars held in F.D.I.C.-insured banks, but only two stablecoin companies (Paxos and Circle) have anything resembling F.D.I.C.-insured accounts; most of their competitors bank offshore. He writes that LeBron James was an FTX spokesman; he wasn’t. He describes things as “hacks” that weren’t hacks, like when a trader on FTX manipulated the market for a little-traded token and made off with hundreds of millions in profits.
He argues that if one takes into account the “shitcoins”—the crypto equivalent of junk bonds—that helped underwrite Bankman-Fried’s empire, “FTX was solvent right up to the moment it collapsed.” In fact, FTX was insolvent to the tune of $8 billion, a hole that only grew as Bankman-Fried allowed Alameda unlimited access to FTX customer funds.
Lewis notes that millions of dollars in Alameda’s crypto were frozen in a Chinese exchange, but he neglects to mention the charge that Bankman-Fried paid a $40 million bribe to Chinese officials to unlock a frozen cache of crypto. (It’s unclear if the two incidents are the same.) Lewis has a lot to say about the moral and intellectual influence of Bankman-Fried’s parents, both of whom are eminent legal scholars, but says nothing about the civil complaint accusing them of gorging themselves on money and luxury real estate at the FTX trough.
Red flags, which are never lacking in crypto’s gray markets, are brushed off as the quirks of an innovative new financial system that few people understand.
Tether, the shadowy stablecoin company with which Alameda somehow did $36 billion worth of business in just a few years, isn’t mentioned once. Lewis acknowledges that Bankman-Fried commingled Alameda and FTX customer funds, but he doesn’t investigate the company’s use of shell companies to bank under fake names. He doesn’t spend much time looking at where Bankman-Fried’s money went, which includes numerous members of Congress and media organizations, sometimes covertly.
Given Lewis’s high profile—the film rights were offered for sale before he wrote a word—and the seeming complexity of crypto, Going Infinite will invariably help define Bankman-Fried and the FTX fraud in the public imagination. Yet for all the author’s curiosity about Bankman-Fried’s peculiar public image, his meteoric rise, his mental health, and his professed commitment to a code that absolves him of his greed so long as it leads to some undefined future benefit for humanity, Lewis shows remarkably little skepticism. He seems to accept crypto’s utility and Bankman-Fried’s charitable intent as given, when both are far from proven.
A more modest writer might have foregrounded his own misplaced enthusiasm for a young tech mogul anointed as a genius, using it as an opportunity to probe the media’s, and his own, complicity in propping up someone who, it’s clear even from Lewis’s account, should never have been handed so much money, power, and influence. He might have apologized to his financier friend to whom he gave bad advice.
Instead, Lewis doubles down on his priors, to the point where he doubts that any crime even occurred. In that, he is like a classic fraud victim. No one wants to believe that they’ve been had.
Jacob Silverman is a co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
