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A review by nicokrieger
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis
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…