Title: Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of A New Tycoon
Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Rs 1299; Pp 255
Michael Lewis is a master storyteller, and Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of A New Tycoon is an important evidence of that talent. That is only to be expected from the author of Liar’s Poker, The Big Short and Flash Boys – books that showcased his uncanny gift for finding human tales in the opaque machinations of the world’s money markets.
No doubt, Lewis had a difficult job of chronicling the life of the founder of a chaotic organisation who spent half his time locked in a dirty office playing games and half his time flying around the world without bothering to tell his staff where he was going. The rich details of Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) personal life, told with a tinge of humour, are an enjoyable read.
For example, the book suggests SBF’s downfall could be partly traced to a secretive affair with a young woman called Caroline Ellison, the CEO of the investment wing of his empire – Alameda Research. It is alleged he used billions of dollars from FTX to repay loans owed by Alameda. Lewis got hold of the love letters exchanged between them – weird bullet-point confessionals of anguish and cost-benefit analysis.
Also, sample this. Lewis ends his story by describing how SBF’s parents were so fearful for their security that they purchased a German shepherd named Sandor, who had been trained to kill on command when given the correct instructions in German. The parents had learned the commands, but SBF had not. “So when SBF was in a room with the dog, it always felt as if some accident was waiting to happen,” Lewis writes. “It would have been very SBF to have been eaten by his own guard dog.”
The author does have a wonderful eye for the perfect absurd detail that sum up the eccentricities of the young man. Lewis notes architects designing a new FTX headquarters in the Bahamas were asked to structure the exterior of the building to resemble SBF’s hair. “Sam wanted the building shaped like an F for the benefit of the people in the planes descending into Lynden Pindling International Airport,” Lewis writes. “He wanted the side of the building to evoke his unruly hair.”
We also know that SBF often played video games during television interviews and zoom meetings, and he didn’t even know the names of two of the three people on the company’s board of directors-and said their only purpose was to rubber stamp whatever he wanted. There’s more. Hotel rooms that were booked for the FTX CEO would often be untouched. Instead, he might be found walking the streets posting on social media or talking to a journalist on the other side of the world. While SBF would agree to meetings, he would often simply not show up, which led to some last-minute scrambling by organisations and executives.
Yet, Going Infinite, a biography of a man who has been convicted of fraud and conspiracy and is facing an impending sentence of up to 110 years, would find a very awkward place on the shelves of history. Here’s why. After his first meeting with SBF, at the end of 2021, Lewis recalls how a friend who was about to close a deal with the disgraced SBF had asked Lewis to look into him. In the opening pages of the book, Lewis writes he was “totally sold” on the young man. That has remained the dominant theme of the book – it’s as if SBF had a hypnotic effect on him.
Lewis, who travelled back and forth from the Bahamas, where SBF was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat – from which he could apparently see nothing. “As late as the final days of October 2022,” he writes, “you could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.”
When the author is in such awe of the subject of his book, it dents credibility. For example, without even an iota of evidence, Lewis compares FTX’s CEO-in-bankruptcy’s attempts to sift through the remains of the fallen FTX empire to an ignorant amateur archaeologist trying to fabricate believable explanations for artefacts beyond his understanding. “The pleasure John Ray took in whatever he unearthed was so infectious that I often didn’t have the heart to say, ‘I’m not quite sure that you’ve found exactly what you think you have found’,” Lewis writes. The naivety is quite galling.
The book gives ample space to what Bankman-Fried had long been trying to position him as. We get to know that he was a vegan, because he cared about the earth; he slept on a beanbag chair by his desk, because he didn’t care about his personal comfort. In 2017, he helped found a crypto trading firm, Alameda, and two years later built a crypto futures exchange, FTX, because he was an effective altruist whose goal was to make enormous amounts of money to donate to worthy causes. Lewis says SBF, an overachieving child born to two overachieving parents, was taught at an early age about utilitarianism. So if he is committing fraud, it’s because he wants to give the money to the needy. Readers might wonder the reason for the author’s willing suspension of disbelief of an ideological fantasy land that SBF sold him.
Going Infinite tries to present SBF as a brilliant but hapless savant, whose mistakes as CEO allowed for massive fraud to be carried out under his nose. The truth, however, is that he siphoned billions of dollars of customer money, banking on the odds he’d never be caught. From Lewis, one had expected an incisive inside view into a historic collapse that saw billions of dollars go up in flames at the expense of multitudes of people who were financially ruined. In that sense, he has disappointed readers.
