'I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. "One hundred and fifty billion dollars,"he finally said-though he added that he had use for "infinity dollars"...'
Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just rich. Before he turned thirty he'd become the world's youngest billionaire,making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs,celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.
Then it all fell apart.
Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world,a rumpled guy in cargo shorts,whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side,who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly
Michael Lewis was there when it happened,having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other,taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted'thinking machine',and wild financial roller-coaster ride,this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes,of crypto mania and insane amounts of money,of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241651117Number of pages: 272Weight: 460 gDimensions: 236 x 158 x 32 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Going Infinite is a stupefyingly pleasurable book to read. It's perfectly paced,extremely funny,and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting... What he began with Moneyball has come into full flower with Going Infinite. Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized,at least here and there,by uneven and unreliable information. Perhaps Lewis's book should encourage an update,however minuscule,in our own priors.Going Infinite is a portrait of grandiose ambitions,youthful arrogance,and the distorting power of money... (Lewis) remains the greatest living exponent of the plain style in reporting. His eye for detail is unsurpassed... And as a chronicle of collective delusion - a modern version of the Dutch tulip mania - Going Infinite is an instant classic... Michael Lewis deserves huge credit for capturing (SBF) in all his infinite weirdness... Mark Zuckerberg,another boy genius in ratty shoes,once described Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Sam Bankman-Fried was a Seth Rogen character who fell into a tulip field circa 1634. Another one will be along in a minute. We never learn.Lewis'storytelling is as good as ever... In the past,Mr Lewis has focused on little-known people doing extraordinary things. This time his subject is notorious... Mr Bankman-Fried's hyper-rationality sets him apart from everyone. He views people not as good or bad,but as "probability distributions"around a mean... By tolerating the idea that hyper-rationalists cannot make sense of the rules of the game the way most people do,Mr Lewis implicitly asks readers to reconsider whatever they thought they knew about Mr Bankman-Fried. In the court of public opinion,he is already convicted. That's reason enough to give this book a read.Michael Lewis has an uncanny instinct for a big story,and is now right in the thick of the action again... Reading Lewis can feel like being a passenger in an expertly piloted bobsleigh. You're moving so fast down the mountain,but you know you're going to be delivered safe and sound - hot chocolate waiting at the bottom. There is no need to stress,only to thrill to the scenery as it hurtles past.In November 2022,FTX collapsed in a matter of days after it suffered billions of dollars in customer withdrawals,sending shockwaves through the crypto world. To make sense of all this,with perfect timing,comes Michael Lewis... Going Infinite is his superbly detailed picture of the man behind it... So where might the money have gone We still don't entirely know,though Lewis offers some preliminary balance sheet calculations - which remain more detailed than anything FTX ever published.Michael Lewis is the world's finest financial storyteller... Going Infinite is at its best in describing Bankman-Fried's rise... Lewis is equally sharp on how the effective altruism movement shifted its priorities,from donating to prevent disease and mortality in the global south to worrying about (putative) trillions of human lives across the galaxy in the distant future.When the stories of our times are told,there will be no more seminal documents than the books of Michael Lewis.I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.In the hands of Michael Lewis,anything is possible.He is so good everyone else may as well pack up.Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books.
Professor Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis is a bestselling American non-fiction author and financial journalist,best known for Moneyball,Flash Boys,and The Fifth Risk.
Visit the Professor Michael Lewis author page
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