Going Infinite

Lewis met Sam Bankman-Fried in 2021, when Brad Katsuyama of IEX, the hero of Flash Boys, asked him to size up the young founder of FTX as a possible investor. Lewis kept reporting, which put him inside the company when it failed and billions of dollars of customer money turned out to be missing.

The book is strongest as character study. Lewis presents Bankman-Fried as a probabilistic thinker who treated every decision as an expected-value bet, an effective altruist who said he was getting rich to give money away, and a manager who played video games during meetings and kept no meaningful org chart.

Reviews were harsh about the book's judgment. Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times called Lewis stubbornly credulous, Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times said he showed no skepticism, and James Ledbetter in the Washington Post said he spent too much time second-guessing bankruptcy CEO John J. Ray III and too little on the fraud. The book came out on the first day of jury selection in Bankman-Fried's trial, and he was convicted on all seven counts that November.

Read it as a vivid inside account of FTX's culture, then pair it with Zeke Faux's Number Go Up and the trial record for the full picture of what happened to customers' money.

1. Expected-value thinking without limits is dangerous. Bankman-Fried's willingness to take any bet with positive expected value, however large the downside, is the thread that runs from his trading to FTX's collapse.
2. Controls are not optional. FTX had no real board, no CFO for much of its life and customer funds mixed with a trading affiliate, the governance failures any allocator should screen for.
3. Related-party arrangements are where frauds hide. The tie between FTX and Alameda Research, which traded on the exchange it was affiliated with, was the fault line that broke the firm.
4. Confidence can vanish in days. A leaked balance sheet and one rival's tweets turned into a run that emptied the exchange within a week.
5. Access is not the same as judgment. Lewis had extraordinary access, and the critical reaction to his book shows why investors should test even the best-told story against the documents.

Lewis tells the story chronologically, moving from origin to empire to collapse.

1. Formation. Bankman-Fried grows up in a family of Stanford academics, finds school dull, and discovers his talent for fast probabilistic betting as a trader at Jane Street. Effective altruism gives him a reason to chase money.
2. Alameda Research. In 2017 he leaves Jane Street to start Alameda in Berkeley, exploiting bitcoin price gaps between Asian and US exchanges. The firm makes money but nearly falls apart in 2018 when many of his early partners walk out over his management.
3. FTX. He launches FTX in 2019, moves operations from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, signs celebrity endorsements and stadium deals, and spends heavily on politics and philanthropy. Lewis describes life in the Bahamas compound and the absence of basic corporate controls.
4. Collapse. A leaked Alameda balance sheet and a public move by Binance's Changpeng Zhao to dump FTX's token trigger a run in November 2022. Customer deposits that had flowed to Alameda cannot be returned, and the exchange files for bankruptcy.
5. Aftermath. Lewis follows Bankman-Fried under house arrest, profiles Caroline Ellison and other lieutenants, and challenges John J. Ray III's handling of the bankruptcy, arguing that more of the money may still exist than first thought.

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?

In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own―until it all came undone.