gls_merch's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Michael Lewis knows how to tell a story. This is credit to his ability to get close to his subject and get candid information. He clearly lays bare how SBF and FTX/Alameda rose to prominence, and how this happened with no adults in the room and an utter lack of internal controls. It is indisputable that Alameda, an entity controlled by SBF, was able to access FTX customer funds at no costs and faced no margin liquidation risk. Therefore, it boggles my mind how Lewis so easily excuses the loss of customer funds and bankruptcy. It doesn't matter they've managed to recover 90 cents on the dollar in bankruptcy. The funds were not safu. It's this bizarro conclusion that weighs heavily on the rating of this book.
mundinova's review against another edition
5.0
Imagine a train wreck where all the cars are filled with dumpster fires and the engineer driving the train headlong into the wreck is the John Travolta Confused gif. That's SBF and FTX.
Where do I begin?
Let's start with Michael Lewis and his Stockholm Syndrome. Yes, he might have drunk the Kool-Aid at the end, but the first 90% of the book before the bankruptcy chapter makes it clear SBF is not a good person and is essentially the Holden Caulfield of finance (yes, he even called people “phonies”). But there's also the setup of red-flag-waving obvious fraud. Let's check off the Fraud 101 things FTX did:
1) The whole company was a black box and only one person knew how it worked. Check.
2) No one knew where any of the money was at any time and SBF saw no use in hiring a CFO or having a Board of "grown-ups." Check.
3) Alameda Research had FTX customer funds. Check.
Number 3 is the most damning and really the only piece of evidence you need. To hear Lewis and everyone else talk about FTx, there was plenty of money to be had. So moving the money is the smoking gun/cannon yelling fraud. It doesn't matter if they "technically" had the missing money and just lost track of it. That's like me saying to the bank who holds my mortgage, "Sure I haven't paid my monthly payments, but I have money around here somewhere. What? You're foreclosing on me? But the money is here somewhere, I swear. I just need to find it. Trust me."
Yeah, no one is trusting me. And no one should be in the position to have to trust me. Because we all expect adults to be grown-ups. And SBF isn't a grown-up. He's incapable of empathy or the basic understanding that his actions hurt people. He was given billions of dollars and was deluded enough to think he should have that money because he was going to do the most "good." Effective Altruism might be the worst thing to ever happen to humanity because it justifies billionaires.
This book is unputdownable. So many twists and turns. It reads like a thriller and the reason why is Lewis was in the room as it was happening. He was there on the day the shit hit the fan. We get to know who was yelling at who in the living room of the 30 million dollar penthouse and it all played out like a David Fincher movie.
Oh, and did I mention the hilarious "sex" memos between SBF and his girlfriend, the CEO of Alameda Research?
Theme/Message: 5 stars
Writing: 5 stars
Where do I begin?
Let's start with Michael Lewis and his Stockholm Syndrome. Yes, he might have drunk the Kool-Aid at the end, but the first 90% of the book before the bankruptcy chapter makes it clear SBF is not a good person and is essentially the Holden Caulfield of finance (yes, he even called people “phonies”). But there's also the setup of red-flag-waving obvious fraud. Let's check off the Fraud 101 things FTX did:
1) The whole company was a black box and only one person knew how it worked. Check.
2) No one knew where any of the money was at any time and SBF saw no use in hiring a CFO or having a Board of "grown-ups." Check.
3) Alameda Research had FTX customer funds. Check.
Number 3 is the most damning and really the only piece of evidence you need. To hear Lewis and everyone else talk about FTx, there was plenty of money to be had. So moving the money is the smoking gun/cannon yelling fraud. It doesn't matter if they "technically" had the missing money and just lost track of it. That's like me saying to the bank who holds my mortgage, "Sure I haven't paid my monthly payments, but I have money around here somewhere. What? You're foreclosing on me? But the money is here somewhere, I swear. I just need to find it. Trust me."
Yeah, no one is trusting me. And no one should be in the position to have to trust me. Because we all expect adults to be grown-ups. And SBF isn't a grown-up. He's incapable of empathy or the basic understanding that his actions hurt people. He was given billions of dollars and was deluded enough to think he should have that money because he was going to do the most "good." Effective Altruism might be the worst thing to ever happen to humanity because it justifies billionaires.
This book is unputdownable. So many twists and turns. It reads like a thriller and the reason why is Lewis was in the room as it was happening. He was there on the day the shit hit the fan. We get to know who was yelling at who in the living room of the 30 million dollar penthouse and it all played out like a David Fincher movie.
Oh, and did I mention the hilarious "sex" memos between SBF and his girlfriend, the CEO of Alameda Research?
Theme/Message: 5 stars
Writing: 5 stars
avassilakas's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Very readable style. Great book for vacation and dipping into a number of different characters and their motives. Fun but ultimately shallow read.
nicokrieger's review
2.0
I finished this book last month but wanted to wait until the result of Sam Bankman Fried's trial to write my review for it. Now that I have finished reading about the trial, oh boy, get ready for a wild ride…
I was very excited when I first saw this book because I had loosely followed the collapse of FTX during the end of 2022 but did not know more about it than the mainstream media reported back then. When I saw that Michael Lewis was writing a book about FTX and Sam Bankman Fried, I got very excited. I have read multiple of his books, such as "Moneyball", "The Big Short," and “The Premonition”, and loved each and every one of them. They all make you feel as if you were a detective, following the protagonists around while unraveling unnerving truths about a catastrophic event that will happen, but nobody else knows about it yet. In these books, Lewis did a great job portraying the multilayered protagonists and taking a deep dive into their personalities. Combining this with his unique ability to explain financial concepts for everyone to understand, he seemed like the perfect fit to write a book about FTX and Sam Bankman Fried (SBF). The stage seemed to be set for a great new book in the making!
The story of Going Infinite is mainly woven around SBF, the CEO and founder of FTX, who starts off as a weirdly looking, socially awkward trader working at Jane Street Capital. I really enjoyed this first part of the book, where Lewis gives us an intimate look at SBFs' weird behavior and his different way of thinking. His awkward personality makes him look like an extreme misfit, but at the same time paints this picture of a down-to-earth genius. During the rise of FTX, he suddenly became one of the richest men on earth, with the FTX logo being displayed on sports arenas and its ad playing during the Super Bowl. Despite this sudden rise to fame, nothing will change about SBF's shabby appearance, resembling more a teenager who hasn’t seen the inside of a bathroom for weeks than a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. Even in meetings with journalists, politicians, and celebrities, he will wear his cargo shorts and T-shirt, most of the time playing a video game while talking with those people about spending millions of dollars. On top of that, he is a member of the so-called “effective altruists” movement, which tries to gain as much money as possible to then donate it making the world a better place. In the case of SBF, making the world a better place is mostly realized by performing giant political donations.
When the collapse of FTX occurs, Lewis reports about multiple things that went really bad at FTX. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it when Lewis, for example, tells us that FTX had been illegally using billions of customer funds from FTX at their partner corporation Alameida Research which they now could not repay. This was the point in the book when I expected the story of the incredible crypto mastermind to shift its narrative. I was waiting for unexpected discoveries about SBF’s personality and insights into all the fraud behind the curtains of FTX. But none of this happened. I don’t know how after all the bad things that occurred at FTX that Lewis even mentions in this book, he still concludes that the situation is not as bad as it seems and paints SBF as the misunderstood genius that would have never knowingly disguised the situation to cause harm for anybody.
But maybe my judgment of the situation is wrong, and all this time Lewis spent with SBF really made him see the hidden truth to be revealed to all of us. This is why I waited for the trial before giving this book a bad review. I owed this to Michael Lewis after all the great books he had written in the past.
When this week, I finally managed to read about the findings of the trial, I was even more shocked than when reading the end of the book. Turns out that SBF has not only lied to the public about the safety of their deposits, but he also was the main character in a big fraud happening at FTX, involving faked balance sheets and a lot more mess I won’t go into here.
In the end, SBF was found guilty of all charges and is now facing decades in jail.
I don’t know how Michael Lewis got so drawn into the story that he could not see this coming and finished his book without directing serious blame toward SBF. In difference to his other books, he started writing the story before everything started to go bad. Maybe he was so deep into his story of this awkward genius who became a multi-billionaire overnight that he could not see clearly once the collapse happened. But this is only a wild guess, trying to explain to myself how one of my favorite authors could end up on the wrong side of such a story.
I started this book in the hope of reading a compelling story like the one portrayed in “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou, which is one of my all-time favorites. In this book, we are shown how Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, built a multi-billion-dollar company on the fundament of fraud and a medical device that did not work. Funnily, Lewis is confronted in an interview at 60 minutes that SBF is just a reincarnation of Elizabeth Holmes in cargo shorts. His response tells you all you need to know about this book:
"It is a little different, supplying phony medical information to people that might kill them” and “possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas”.
This is how Lewis thinks about this whole collapse: crypto speculators in the Bahamas possibly losing some money. At no point in the book does he reflect on the real weight of the FTX collapse, which led to thousands of people losing their savings, homes, and lives…
I don’t say it was smart to deposit all your life savings at FTX, but let’s face reality: this is what will happen when you spend a billion dollars on advertising for people like Tom Brady and Steph Curry to tell everybody that FTX is a save and easy way to make money without you needing to understand it…
To bring this much too-long review to an end: I am very disappointed by this book. It was a good and interesting read, but the conclusions that were drawn out of it at the end just hurt…
I was very excited when I first saw this book because I had loosely followed the collapse of FTX during the end of 2022 but did not know more about it than the mainstream media reported back then. When I saw that Michael Lewis was writing a book about FTX and Sam Bankman Fried, I got very excited. I have read multiple of his books, such as "Moneyball", "The Big Short," and “The Premonition”, and loved each and every one of them. They all make you feel as if you were a detective, following the protagonists around while unraveling unnerving truths about a catastrophic event that will happen, but nobody else knows about it yet. In these books, Lewis did a great job portraying the multilayered protagonists and taking a deep dive into their personalities. Combining this with his unique ability to explain financial concepts for everyone to understand, he seemed like the perfect fit to write a book about FTX and Sam Bankman Fried (SBF). The stage seemed to be set for a great new book in the making!
The story of Going Infinite is mainly woven around SBF, the CEO and founder of FTX, who starts off as a weirdly looking, socially awkward trader working at Jane Street Capital. I really enjoyed this first part of the book, where Lewis gives us an intimate look at SBFs' weird behavior and his different way of thinking. His awkward personality makes him look like an extreme misfit, but at the same time paints this picture of a down-to-earth genius. During the rise of FTX, he suddenly became one of the richest men on earth, with the FTX logo being displayed on sports arenas and its ad playing during the Super Bowl. Despite this sudden rise to fame, nothing will change about SBF's shabby appearance, resembling more a teenager who hasn’t seen the inside of a bathroom for weeks than a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. Even in meetings with journalists, politicians, and celebrities, he will wear his cargo shorts and T-shirt, most of the time playing a video game while talking with those people about spending millions of dollars. On top of that, he is a member of the so-called “effective altruists” movement, which tries to gain as much money as possible to then donate it making the world a better place. In the case of SBF, making the world a better place is mostly realized by performing giant political donations.
When the collapse of FTX occurs, Lewis reports about multiple things that went really bad at FTX. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it when Lewis, for example, tells us that FTX had been illegally using billions of customer funds from FTX at their partner corporation Alameida Research which they now could not repay. This was the point in the book when I expected the story of the incredible crypto mastermind to shift its narrative. I was waiting for unexpected discoveries about SBF’s personality and insights into all the fraud behind the curtains of FTX. But none of this happened. I don’t know how after all the bad things that occurred at FTX that Lewis even mentions in this book, he still concludes that the situation is not as bad as it seems and paints SBF as the misunderstood genius that would have never knowingly disguised the situation to cause harm for anybody.
But maybe my judgment of the situation is wrong, and all this time Lewis spent with SBF really made him see the hidden truth to be revealed to all of us. This is why I waited for the trial before giving this book a bad review. I owed this to Michael Lewis after all the great books he had written in the past.
When this week, I finally managed to read about the findings of the trial, I was even more shocked than when reading the end of the book. Turns out that SBF has not only lied to the public about the safety of their deposits, but he also was the main character in a big fraud happening at FTX, involving faked balance sheets and a lot more mess I won’t go into here.
In the end, SBF was found guilty of all charges and is now facing decades in jail.
I don’t know how Michael Lewis got so drawn into the story that he could not see this coming and finished his book without directing serious blame toward SBF. In difference to his other books, he started writing the story before everything started to go bad. Maybe he was so deep into his story of this awkward genius who became a multi-billionaire overnight that he could not see clearly once the collapse happened. But this is only a wild guess, trying to explain to myself how one of my favorite authors could end up on the wrong side of such a story.
I started this book in the hope of reading a compelling story like the one portrayed in “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou, which is one of my all-time favorites. In this book, we are shown how Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, built a multi-billion-dollar company on the fundament of fraud and a medical device that did not work. Funnily, Lewis is confronted in an interview at 60 minutes that SBF is just a reincarnation of Elizabeth Holmes in cargo shorts. His response tells you all you need to know about this book:
"It is a little different, supplying phony medical information to people that might kill them” and “possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas”.
This is how Lewis thinks about this whole collapse: crypto speculators in the Bahamas possibly losing some money. At no point in the book does he reflect on the real weight of the FTX collapse, which led to thousands of people losing their savings, homes, and lives…
I don’t say it was smart to deposit all your life savings at FTX, but let’s face reality: this is what will happen when you spend a billion dollars on advertising for people like Tom Brady and Steph Curry to tell everybody that FTX is a save and easy way to make money without you needing to understand it…
To bring this much too-long review to an end: I am very disappointed by this book. It was a good and interesting read, but the conclusions that were drawn out of it at the end just hurt…
coulterdaniel's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
nicktommasini's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.5
What it's about: Sam Bankman-Fried is a highly introverted, arguably sociopathic math genius responsible for one of the largest financial frauds in recent history. Having never fit in with other children (didn't celebrate holidays or birthdays, couldn't really hold a conversation), he made no close relationships until his time at MIT, where he was recruited to join Jane Street, a quant trading fund that makes money by dynamically pricing the ETF market with creative algorithms. Shortly prior to his job at Jane Street, he also became interest in effective altruism, or the idea of gaining as much wealth as possible to redistribute to valuable causes (as others with wealth will not do the same) -- everything is an EV to these people, and gaining enough wealth to invest in meaningful causes is the highest possible EV. He quits Jane Street to start up a similar market making crypto quant fund of his own called Alameda Research, with ~$170mm of capital from effective altruists lent to start the fund. He has a big schism with some of the early founders over his inability to manage others, his indifference over a hack, and his intention to use a highly complex model to run the algorithmic trading, but he recovers. He also starts FTX, a crypto exchange, to increase customer awareness of crypto and generate interest and accessibility, in a strategy diametrically opposed to the "move fast and break things" approach of CZ's Binance. It all comes crashing down in November 2022, when it's revealed that ~$8-10bn of customer deposits that were supposed to be in FTX ended up inside of Alameda Research. FTX's FTT coin crashed, customers raced to withdraw their deposits, and consumers were left holding the bag.
What I liked: Michael Lewis is a great storyteller and knows how to write a compelling backstory. SBF comes across as a fascinating, highly flawed kid who never really grew up into a fully functioning adult. The first 2/3rds of the book are really solid for this reason, and his early days are chronicled well.
What I didn't like: The ending is super rushed and feels incomplete, discussing the entire collapse in <50 pages. It also buys too heavily into SBF's account of what happened, making the entire exercise feel like a series of cascading errors and not intentional fraud -- which he has now been convicted of.
Overall a fun read -- but not a totally comprehensive view of SBF, and especially FTX/Alameda's collapse.
What I liked: Michael Lewis is a great storyteller and knows how to write a compelling backstory. SBF comes across as a fascinating, highly flawed kid who never really grew up into a fully functioning adult. The first 2/3rds of the book are really solid for this reason, and his early days are chronicled well.
What I didn't like: The ending is super rushed and feels incomplete, discussing the entire collapse in <50 pages. It also buys too heavily into SBF's account of what happened, making the entire exercise feel like a series of cascading errors and not intentional fraud -- which he has now been convicted of.
Overall a fun read -- but not a totally comprehensive view of SBF, and especially FTX/Alameda's collapse.