by Michael Lewis
This book is getting a lot of flack for being fawning and credulous, because Lewis doesn’t tell a story of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as villain, It’s very interesting that parts 1 and 2 of this book were hashed out before the FTX collapse, when Lewis was merely shadowing SBF and trying to gather material for a possible book. He got his book. He unwittingly got a front-row seat to the “implosion.” But as the NYT review stated, you can see the original book peeking through.
I don’t mind any of this. I take it for what it is: Lewis’ real-time impressions of SBF and his crew.
The impressions are: Yes, SBF is… different. Caroline Ellison is an egoless spineless character without the foggiest idea how to run Alameda research. It’s painful seeing the personal memos she and SBF write to each other about basically whether or not they should fuck each other. (Answer: No, No, neither one of you should be sleeping with the other one.) The other characters were not as nailed down for me. Oh, except the therapist. There’s an actual therapist on the FTX campus who treats just about everyone. Other than that, there are a lot of people from the old Hong Kong office who moved to the Bahamas, and then there are the horde of faceless “effective altruists” who share SBF’s penthouse.
As an aside, the effective altruists sure are a weird lot. I was and am interested in EA as well as crypto, which makes me so into the SBF story. But at first my impression was that EA was basically about rating charities, so you can figure out which ones are really the most effective ones to donate to – and this is an unmitigated good, for sure! And maybe also about figuring out which interventions in the world are most effective at truly alleviating human suffering and saving lives, e.g. anti-malaria bed nets – also indubitably a very good thing! But now the EA crew as a whole has turned their attention to “existential risks” – climate change, asteroids, AI, and nuclear war – because the calculations state, an intervention that could potentially save ALL of humanity from extinction, protecting all those future lives, must trump anything you can possibly do here in the present for these measly 6-7 billion. I part company here.
But I digress, as is my wont. I loved having a book to read on the FTX collapse – I’m sure there will be many more to come.
Tytania 