Going Infinite

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis

★★★★½

While I will admit some of Lewis’ writing really annoys me – like the egregious cherry-picking-to-make-a-story of The Premonition and rehash of Thinking Fast and Slow in The Undoing Project – I plowed through this in very short order, really couldn’t put it down… I followed the FTX story as it unfolded in the media pretty closely, and to be honest was somewhat satisfied with Bankman-Fried’s sentence when it was handed down in 2024: guys like Bankman-Fried give capitalism a bad name and make life harder for those of us who ply their trade as part of the financial markets. But the unparalleled access Lewis had to the FTX inner circle over the span of a year or two provides an intriguing insight into the company and Bankman-Fried himself. After finishing the book, I honestly think the guy probably had upstanding intentions, but just didn’t care about risk management and was moving too fast to worry about the implications. Classic Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” behavior. If a small handful of events leading to the crypto crash – discussed in detail in the book – hadn’t taken place in late 2022 it’s not entirely inconceivable that FTX could today be the largest securities exchange in the world. Definitely worth the read.

Goodreads: “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.