Finance

Attention All Finance Dweebs: The Michael Lewis Book About FTX And Sam Bankman-Fried Is Here!

There is a lot to this story. Fortunately for the reading public, we are about to find out just how deep this rabbit hole went.

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FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Attends Court

(Photo by Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the wake of the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis, the concept of cryptocurrency sprang into existence with the publication of the original Bitcoin whitepaper. A decade and a half followed of people scratching their heads and saying, “Wait, so it’s just data bytes on a blockchain backed by no one and nothing? Why does this have value again?”

Meanwhile, a lot of other people were making money. Tons of money, in fact, and not just the digital kind.

One of those people was Sam Bankman-Fried. Though he has not (yet) been convicted of any major crimes, he is now sitting in jail awaiting trial on federal fraud charges after U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked his bail upon a finding that he had probably been engaging in a little witness tampering.

It was not always so. As a mere 20-something, Bankman-Fried started running the trading desk Alameda Research in 2017. Given his success as a trader, Bankman-Fried was able to easily parlay the buzz surrounding his name into a new venture: FTX. Bankman-Fried launched this new cryptocurrency exchange in May 2019 and never looked back.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that someone barely out of his teens who regularly played video games during work meetings probably should not have been put in charge of billions of dollars. At the time though, everyone wanted a piece of the action. Investors and celebrity endorsers lined up to overlook Bankman-Fried’s eccentricities — as long as they could get their beaks wet, that is.

Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Larry David, and Gisele Bündchen are just a few of the A-listers who were happy to lend their names to FTX. The firm owned naming rights to multiple sports stadiums. In its heyday, FTX became the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange as it saw close to $30 billion in daily volume.

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And then it all came crashing down. Shortly after a number of its shady business practices were exposed, FTX imploded into bankruptcy, and its founder found himself in a jail cell complaining about the food.

There is a lot more to this story. Fortunately for the reading public, we are about to find out just how deep this rabbit hole went.

Michael Lewis is probably the greatest financial journalist of his generation. You might know him as the author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball,” “Flash Boys,” and “The Big Short.” Very soon you will be able to read his take on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.

The new book is called “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon” (affiliate link). In his latest work, Lewis tells the story of this frumpy faux-Gatsby, this Millennial Bernie Madoff, whose meteoric rise to fame and money was outdone only by the steepness of his fall from power. “Going Infinite“ is going to be Lewis at his best.

And the best part about this soon-to-be bestseller? Lewis was embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried for months before the latter’s empire crumbled. That means Lewis was there as FTX went up in smoke. Not since “Liar’s Poker“ have we gotten a Michael Lewis book in which the author himself was so close to the action.

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So, get on Bookshop, go to your favorite independent bookseller, or hit up your local library (I’m a library dweeb myself, in addition to being a finance dweeb). Pick yourself up a copy of “Going Infinite“ and join the conversation. Perhaps all it will take is Lewis’ deft prose to convince the world of finance that there’s no such thing as a person in their 20s who should have billions of dollars to play with.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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