The Moneyball author develops a misguided soft spot for fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried
that makes an already fascinating book more delicious. As followers of the collapse of the crypto king’s empire will know, halfway through the writing of the book, the author’s task changed dramatically from profiling one of the world’s youngest billionaires to charting his spectacular implosion. Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is bankrupt and he is now appearing in a Manhattan federal court on multiple charges of fraud.
There are, essentially, two books unfolding within Going Infinite, the first a straightforward romp through Bankman-Fried’s life that delivers at the level of pure entertainment. His parents are both law professors at Stanford, crunchy academics who don’t see the need to celebrate birthdays or encourage their clever child in the delusion of Santa Claus.
This part of the book is very jolly indeed, jammed with nuggets that remind one just how good Lewis is at winning the trust of his subjects. When Bankman-Fried settled on the Bahamas as a location for his business, he wondered, idly, if he should pay off the country’s $9bn national debt to improve its infrastructure so workers for FTX wanted to move there.
From the evidence presented, it does seem that Bankman-Fried isn’t motivated by personal, material gain. Self-enrichment doesn’t interest him beyond the gamer’s urge to beat the house and defeat his opponents. The absence of lavish spending, however, is not in itself evidence of the simplicity of motive Lewis ascribes to him. Bankman-Fried believes life’s only sensible philosophy is utilitarianism, which, he tells the author, scares most people because it “encourages selflessness”.