The Journalist and the Fallen Billionaire
Michael Lewis was captivated by Sam Bankman-Fried from their very first meeting—and on the evidence of Lewis’s new book, Going Infinite, his affection has not wavered in the two years since. Which is surprising, because Bankman-Fried is no longer a lauded cryptocurrency billionaire but an alleged con man, on trial for seven counts of fraud and money laundering. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
Lewis was introduced to Bankman-Fried by an unnamed friend, who was poised to invest in the latter’s crypto exchange, FTX. The deal “would bind their fates, through an exchange of shares in each other’s companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” and so, naturally, the friend wanted Lewis to check out this scatterbrained prodigy who had gotten rich from trading virtual money.
SBF duly turned up on Lewis’s porch in Berkeley, California, wearing cargo shorts and “ratty New Balance sneakers.” The pair took a walk together, talked about finance and philanthropy, and the older man came away impressed: “I called my friend and said something like: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”
And that, my friends, is a little literary technique we call “foreshadowing.” In November last year, FTX declared bankruptcy. The man who seemed destined to be the world’s first trillionaire—and who wanted to use his money “to address the biggest existential risks to life on earth”—instead ended up getting extradited from the Bahamas. FTX had loaned several billion dollars to Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, leaving it without enough cash to match customer withdrawals. The legality of that loan is now a matter for the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, in Manhattan, New York.
The Bankman-Fried story is a classic tale of hubris, and Michael Lewis had a backstage pass for all of it. Having acted as a food taster for his investor friend—revealed to be Brad Katsuyama, the subject of his 2014 book, —he wound up shadowing SBF in the final days of his pomp, and during the run on FTX that brought him down.
