Going Infinite book review: Conman or wizard? Sam Bankman-Fried is one weird dude

Sam Bankman-Fried is the sort of businessman who makes Elon Musk look almost sensible. Now The Big Short author Michael Lewis turns his attention to the FTX founder.

FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at Manhattan Federal Court for a court appearance oin New York City. He is accused of paying a $40 million bribe to one or more Chinese government officials, as well as fraud, conspiracy, and money-laundering offences. Picture: Getty Images

Sam Bankman-Fried is the sort of businessman who makes Elon Musk look almost sensible, and that takes some doing. If you haven’t heard of Bankman-Fried as yet, well, you’re about to. Prosecutors in his trial for securities fraud, which commenced in the US last week, are wallowing gleefully in the financial swamp that he created with a crypto currency firm known as FTX.

Bankman-Fried was very recently one on the youngest multibillionaires on the planet (on paper). We’re being told that he now has nothing. His investors certainly have nothing (and their money was real).

And now the swamp alligators are tearing him, and everyone who trusted him, to shreds.

Michael Lewis is a business journalist and author of several incisive and hilarious demolition jobs of the perpetrators of fiscal fiascos, kicking off with 1989’s brilliant Liar’s Poker, about his experience as a bond salesman on Wall Street (among other things, it popularised the term “Big Swinging Dick”)and later, The Big Short, about the implosion of the subprime lending housing bubble.

Going Infinite by the business journalist Michael Lewis

Lewis was invited, by Bankman-Fried, to witness first-hand the implosion of FTX, the public face of Sam’s crypto empire, although Sam didn’t know that this was just over the horizon when Lewis turned up (it probably makes sense, if any is to be found in this toxic cocktail of greed and incompetence, to refer to Bankman-Fried as “Sam” since everybody else does.)

Lewis’s new book, Going Infinite, does not attend to fully explain the hows, whys and wherefores of the crypto currency boom that erupted during Covid like the Rotterdam tulip market of 1637, “where the promise of a single bulb traded for triple the price of a Rembrandt”.

He does use footnotes to refer readers to a more critical analysis of how the crypto currency “thing” evolved from baby Bitcoin into the Godzillas of Greed, and I think his critics, well, “short sell” him when they demand more detail.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas. Picture: AFP

As he says, when reflecting on “how elusive Bitcoin is, as a thing to understand ... you nod along and think you are getting it, but then you wake up the next morning needing to hear the explanation all over again”. If you want the gritty details, there’s a lot of it to be had, but that’s not the story that Lewis is telling here.

Going Infinite is a sketch, done with thumbnail dipped in tar, of one of the most peculiar characters in the history of fake money. Sam was a geek in school. He became the kind of hyper-nerd who thinks in numbers, not words, except when he has to use them to explain an investment strategy so convoluted that most of the people he worked for, then employed, simply took his word for it, rather than try to follow the logic.

At MIT he was forced to take one liberal arts subject. In a final exam question, he was asked: “What’s the difference between art and entertainment?” Sam’s assessment of the matter? “It’s a bullshit distinction dreamed up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs.”

Buried in this answer is a clue as to how Sam came to be so wildly successful in business, while looking and behaving like a 12-year-old on steroids, with untamed hair and rumpled clothes.

Sam was certainly entertaining. in as much as no one in the business world had ever, leaving Elon Musk aside for the moment, met anyone even vaguely like him. He seems to have been a genius when it comes to second-guessing how other people would react under a given set of circumstances. He led investors to believe that he not only knew where the money was, but where it was going to be in six months time.

He once described Elon Musk as “one weird dude.” He said this while on a Zoom call with Vogue’s Anna Wintour from his office in the Bahamas. He was dressed, as always, in cargo shorts and a T-shirt, both crying out for laundry time. He was simultaneously trying to out-bid Musk for Twitter.

Bankman-Fried became the kind of hyper-nerd who thinks in numbers, not words. Picture: Getty Images

Going Infinite is a complicated, almost baffling tale of the gullibility of some of these investors, taken to its logical extreme. It seems at times that Sam – the magician performing the tricks – doesn’t think he is deluding anybody. He was the man on stage, but he was also his own audience.

He believed that what he was doing was not only good business but the harbinger of a better way to run economies, and perhaps to improve the world.

There are a lot of people who might say: “I am not fooled by the notion that Sam was fooled by his own notions.”

Prosecutors will argue that he never was an innocent, deluded idealist hamstrung by serious personality disorders. And given that being a Force 9 weirdo is usually only a workable defence in homicide trials, Sam may be looking at a century or so of jail time for fraud.

But is he a conman? Or a probability wizard who should have left MIT to become a bookie? Lewis leaves it to the reader.

I for one can make no sense of the bloke whatsoever, but however you slice him, Sam Bankman-Fried is indeed “one weird dude”.

Pat Sheil is a literary critic.