Review: Going Infinite

 I read Going Infinite expecting some of the trademark incisiveness and insight that Michael Lewis had brought to his other books. To my surprise, Michael Lewis, despite having unprecedented access to Sam Bankman-Fried, apparently swallows SBF at face value, hook, line and sinker.

For instance, right at the end of the book Lewis defends SBF, claiming that it's very likely that FTX was in fact solvent at the time of bankruptcy. That seems pretty unlikely --- if it had indeed been solvent, it would have been easy for FTX to cough up the money that its depositors wanted, rather than declaring bankruptcy. Molly White has an even better takedown of Michael Lewis's claims on her blog.

The entire book, in fact, therefore doesn't add up. We get a lot of claims that SBF made at face value, which isn't very satisfying, and maybe the prurient e-mails and notes between SBF and his one-time romantic partner Caroline Ellison. It's very clear that SBF has effectively told his story well --- but we've seen admissions in public that his belief in Effective Altruism (which still seems to me a crock) was basically a sympathy play --- it was his way into social acceptability for a person who's not very good at socializing with people.

Ultimately, what I'm surprised by was that his employees put up with his treatment of them for so long:

The Serum tokens Sam paid to employees like Friedberg appeared to be fetching $.33 at the time of his bankruptcy. Their true value was not as clear. The FTX employees’ Serum tokens were “locked”; the employees were forbidden from selling them until they became unlocked. The person who did the unlocking was Sam. Initially, the tokens were meant to be unlocked over the course of seven years, starting at the end of the first year. Employees could sell one-seventh of their Serum at the end of that first year, and another seventh at the end of each of the following years, until they’d sold it all. Soon after Serum’s creation, its price had skyrocketed. Sam clearly had not anticipated this. He now had all these employees who felt ridiculously rich. (At least in theory, the value of Dan Friedberg’s Serum stash peaked, in September 2021, at over $1 billion.) In Sam’s view, everyone at once became a lot less motivated to work fourteen-hour days. And so he did a very Sam thing: he changed the terms of the employees’ Serum. In the fine print of the employee Serum contract, he’d reserved for himself the right to extend Serum’s jail time, and he used it to lock up all employees’ Serum for seven years. Sam’s employees had always known that he preferred games in which the rules could change in the middle. They now understood that if he had changed the rules once, he might do it again. They became less enthusiastic about their Serum. “It was very unclear if you had it or if you didn’t have it,” said Ramnik, who had watched in irritation as Sam locked up a bunch of tokens that he’d bought with his own money on the open market before he joined FTX. “I guess you would know in seven years.” (kindle loc 3971)

This is the kind of thing that should have an employee thinking: "If he's willing to cheat me like this, what makes me think that he'll be honest with anyone else, customers, lawyers, or his donors and lenders?" It seems there were plenty of clues as to the fundamental dishonesty of Sam Bankman-Fried. It's just that Michael Lewis chose to ignore all of them, just like his employees did.