The first alarm bell in Michael Lewis’s much-heralded account of the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange FTX arrives as early as the book’s first sentence. Lewis tells us, with surprising candour, that he first heard of Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, from a friend who was about to complete a deal with the precocious billionaire who is now on trial on multiple charges of fraud.
Less than two years later, Lewis has turned out a book that is rather partial in its telling of the FTX story, not to mention necessarily premature, given the current trial of five of its protagonists. It is normal enough for journalists and non-fiction writers to learn things on the hoof but the impression you get about such an admission as Lewis’s is that he has not been observing Bankman-Fried and his companies Alameda Trading/FTX all that long.
Perhaps Lewis felt he had to get the book out while Bankman-Fried’s presumption of innocence was still current, or, perhaps, given his own prestige in the publishing world, he considered himself above an intensive rewrite. Either way, there’s a sense that there’s a lot more in this story to tell.
One of the main problems with Going Infinite is the protagonists are a lot less fascinating than Lewis imagines them to be. Sam Bankman-Fried, in fact, like many tech entrepreneurs who flew too close to the sun, is barely interesting at all. His is an overly familiar tale of a young nerd with a talent for numbers and poor social skills (though Lewis does not at any point say Bankman-Fried is autistic, he appears to have many of the symptoms). Lewis is at times unwarrantedly taken by his subject’s eccentricities: we are told that Bankman-Fried would evaluate potential meetings on how useful they might be to him, down to a single percentage point. In this, he is merely doing what most people do, only with an added layer of quirk that pointlessly elevates the transactional nature of the contemplation.
There is also Bankman-Fried’s dismissal of books and literature and his complete inability to understand how anybody can derive any benefit from them. Lewis quotes a fatuous blog post dismissing Shakespeare that Bankman-Fried once wrote. It’s yet another example of the desolate cultural vacuity that lies at the heart of so many Silicon Valley endeavours. I am reminded of the convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes being reported as eating a quinoa salad on a business trip to Singapore, denoting a woman who was so culturally incurious that she would spurn the sole selling point of the soft autocracy she was visiting: the food.
Bankman-Fried is similarly shut off from local attractions in his globe-trotting, which is driven primarily by finding locations with lax regulations for crypto trading, bringing him first to Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas. The sole interest shown in the outside world is manifested in the involvement of Bankman-Fried and several other key figures in Effective Altruism, a form of targeted charity popular in Silicon Valley. This, naturally, would be derided by many of his detractors when news of the fraud charges broke.
More casual readers will find Going Infinite a bit of a slog, however brief it is, because it goes into the weeds of the abstruse world of cryptocurrencies and presumes a bit of prior familiarity with it on the part of the reader.
Cryptocurrencies and their associated technologies, such as blockchain and the much-maligned non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are not complete trash but their utility continues to be shrouded in obscurity, not least due to their association with money-laundering, Ponzi schemes and various dubious business practices. Lewis appears convinced that Bankman-Fried is the fall guy for the industry as a whole and suggests that a case is being stacked against him largely on the strength of pleas deals for his co-defendants.
While it is true that the people most hoping Bankman-Fried goes down are other key figures in the crypto world, particularly Binance founder and one-time FTX investor Zhao “CZ” Changpeng, Lewis is strangely uninterested in the widespread criticism of FTX that was already going around when he first became aware of the company – there was outrage in many quarters at the sudden spurt of crypto ads at the 2022 Superbowl, for example. This is far from the only instance where Lewis does not tell the whole story.
Given this narrative shortfall, you would be better advised to follow instead the reporting emanating from the trial, which is likely to provide a more lasting record. Had Lewis stuck around to do some courthouse reporting, he might have produced a better book than this.
* This review went to press before Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction.
