"Going Infinite," by Michael Lewis (2023)

What happened?

"On the other hand, he had a nose for talent. His judgment of other people was always far more acute than their judgment of him." - Lewis, on Sam Bankman-Fried

Finished Going Infinite. Michael Lewis got taken for a ride. If you know nothing else about this book, that's the takeaway. His latest work is a history of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, the collapse of Bankman-Fried's company FTX, and the deflation of the crypto speculative bubble.

To put it another way: Bankman-Fried (or SBF, to use the designated acronym) is alleged to have committed world-historical levels of megafraud. According to prosecutors, SBF took money from crypto traders (the FTX exchange side) and put it into speculative investments (his other company, Alameda). When the era of easy credit ended, the bill came due. Billions of dollars vanished. Which explains why as of today, SBF is one of the most infamous litigants on the planet Earth. Right now he's involved in a eight-count federal indictment, courtesy of the prosecutors in the good old U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. If given the maximum sentence, SBF will be 146 years young when he exits prison.

Every published book written about SBF and the collapse of FTX can be condensed down to two questions: What happened? And was he responsible? Lewis's answers are "Obliviousness and incompetence" and "Not really?"

Lewis is not interested in this whole "alleged fraud" part of the story, frankly. The book is a biography of SBF, and it is sympathetic (which in itself is no crime) but does not draw the reasonable conclusions warranted by the evidence.

That's disappointing. Lewis is a reporter of the first order. His entire game is writing about human beings who have unusual powers of perception, and he's failed to display that same perception himself.

Readers should note that there are qualifying rounds to be a Lewis book protagonist: you have to be a clever weirdo that figured out something that nobody else could spot. Lewis protagonists typically work in finance, but also in psychology, the federal government, the strange underworld of sports scouting, you name it. In other words, Lewis writes stories of people who are essentially very good eavesdroppers on the way to being rich or successful, ideally both. He wants Going Infinite to be this kind of book. It's not.

Consider SBF's accusers, his former co-workers: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang. Ellison was SBF's former romantic partner and the notional head of Alameda. Wang wrote the code for FTX. Both have turned state's evidence and are saying that SBF defrauded the world. I'm betting you can almost hear the high-fives echoing from the walls of whatever acoustically-imperfect offices the prosecution is working in.

These witnesses are a problem for Lewis, whose entire narrative is predicated on presenting SBF as a brilliant, hapless man-child who was clueless about anything besides video games and finance. And look, I can believe that FTX was a hermetically-sealed box of sloppiness and mystification involved, since that's the entire method of the crypto industry.

What I cannot accept is that SBF was oblivious to FTX's workings. Time and again in Going Infinite, we are given incidents to suggest SBF is indifferent to human feelings and concerns, which Lewis writes off as fermented quirkiness instead of sociopathy. The proof Lewis assembles for SBF as a Feynman-level intellect are not convincing. They are: one, the worst undergrad philosophy takes you've ever seen; two, real abuse of Bayesian probability; three, deluded applications of utilitarianism; four, math-quiz-bowl levels of calculative competence. We see no evidence of any intellectual talent beyond what you'd expect from your garden variety gifted-and-talented student at a magnet high school. If he was a prodigy of some kind, that fact has been tragically deleted from the actual historical record.

At one point, SBF might've been the first trillionaire. You and I would be hard-pressed to imagine a trillion of anything, much less money. It's preposterous, like claiming your home-built car has eleventy-hundred infinities to the gallon. And yet. There it is: a trillion. Lewis is asking us to assume that this hoard-gathering was done by accident, by a kid who was bored by college.

Going Infinite contains a version of the truth, but not the whole truth. And this seems like a boring and pedestrian conclusion to draw, but think for a moment what that entails. The whole truth is not the testimonial truth of the courtroom, or the truth of the person who tells what they understand rightly. This is indeed truth, but not the whole truth.

Whole truth means comprehending context as much as you can. There are thousand tells for a great journalist. The key one is: What do they choose to focus on? What is relevant to the story, what deserves to be told?

And I humbly suggest this is what Lewis has missed, and he missed it in a way which seems like an unconscious betrayal of what he has written thus far. The totality of the truth doesn't mean just understanding how one dude got lucky with crypto. It means taking a long searching look at the context in which SBF was successful; it means talking about the nature of speculation and trust and possibility.

In the real world, our evidence so far suggests that SBF's major talent was the same as Elizabeth Holmes' -- spotting a mark. He played a type of Silicon Valley character (the same one Holmes did), and then he played the role of a Lewis protagonist.

Let's revisit the quote above, Lewis on SBF: "On the other hand, he had a nose for talent. His judgment of other people was always far more acute than their judgment of him." Having read Lewis on SBF, I think this is a clear win for Bankman-Fried. You must give it to him: he spotted what he needed.