That Michael Lewis’s book about Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) called “Going Infinite” was riveting should come as no surprise. He has to be the best nonfiction finance writer alive. His metaphors and prose make even the most indigestible financial topics go down easy. To write a book like the “Big Short,” which tells the (true!) story of the 2008 market collapse by way of CDOs and tranches and mortgage-backed securities, and to make it an enthralling character-driven adventure, makes my case. (To say nothing of his other books like “Flash Boys” and “The Blind Side” and “Money Ball”; my favorite? Probably the “Undoing Project” which dives into the story of psychology and heuristics, from the lens of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.)
Anyway, on this SBF/FTX saga, I had not followed this at all up until Lewis’s new book came out, which, not coincidentally I would assume, was on bookshelves the day that the trial against SBF started. I vaguely remember some commercials with high-profile celebrities like Tom Brady, and Matt Damon, and then Larry David’s spot for the Super Bowl.
I knew next to nothing about what FTX was: which I now know to basically be SBF’s crypto futures exchange that theatrically collapsed over the course of some months in late 2022.
And I still know next to nothing about crypto, but then again, neither did SBF, nor did he care, at least when he first got into it. Nor do you need to care too much about crypto to appreciate the story.
To say SBF is an odd person is inadequate. I’ll leave it to Lewis to tell the story, but just a note from the book and from Lewis’s “Against the Rules” podcast (also brilliant): Lewis says when he asked SBF for any references who might be able to shed some light on his childhood, there was no one. Literally no one, outside of maybe his parents. Even his own younger brother couldn’t provide insight on who exactly SBF is or was.
SBF didn’t talk to anyone, ever, except for adults that his parents had over for dinner, by way of philosophical debates. SBF thought most theories or subjective assessments that adults had were bullshit, to say nothing of what his fellow classmates thought.
Until he found the Effective Altruist, or EA, movement. What is that? Without going into the full story here, it is a movement that says: do the most good you possibly can for humankind, both humans living now, and for the “trillions” that will live in the future. For example, why become a doctor who can only serve one patient at a time, when you can start a hedge fund, make billions of dollars, and pay thousands of doctors to treat millions of individuals. This is a much more efficient use of time and money, and therefore it is a laudable goal to want to go to Wall Street to make a shit-ton of money to make these things happen, to save all the lives you can.
This is where things get hairy for SBF, and why owning a legitimate crypto exchange like FTX—which just before its collapse was worth, let’s say, $50 billion—was not enough for him.
SBF had to have his trading firm/pet project on the side—Alameda Research—to find market inefficiencies, make lots of money, and donate it to what he deemed worthy causes that could do the most good.
So what happened? As I understand it, he “ignorantly allowed” or “willfully directed”—and this is the gist of the trial—his trading firm, Alameda Research, to take FTX customer money and to trade it and spend it on investments and philanthropic aims that he deemed worthy. And we’re not talking thousands of dollars spent on little causes here and there—we’re talking billions of dollars spent on things ranging from AI companies, to local political races in Oregon, to a fund for Mitch McConnell to use to combat pro-Trump politics.
As Michael Lewis puts it: he took what customer money should have been inside the “cold storage” of FTX’s exchange, and moved it into the “hot hands” of Alameda Research to do whatever in that moment SBF, by way of Alameda or just by himself, thought worth of investment.
This all came to light only because of a good ol’ fashioned bank run (think George Bailey holding Momma and Poppa Dollar up at the end of the day of the bank run in the classic Capra movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”). It’s the same story here.
How did a $50 billion crypto futures exchange collapse so magnificently? Several reasons, but probably the big one was when this guy Zhao, the founder of Binance—both a competitor of and early investor in FTX—said he no longer felt comfortable having his money tied up in FTX, and guess what? The rest of the world, or the rest of the world tangential to crypto, agreed. And all these investors and FTX customers wanted their money back, STAT.
Well, the money wasn’t there. It was tied up in Alameda Research. Or maybe it wasn’t? It’s still unclear where all that money went. And that is and was the job of the bankruptcy lawyers and appointed FTX CEO (by way of bankruptcy proceedings), to figure out: where is all this money, if it exists at all?
The strangest thing, as Lewis points out, is that that money may in fact all be accounted for. The problem for SBF, aside from being accused of fraud, was that what this money was tied up in was not immediately liquid. Not that it might not be there; rather, that it just takes some time to gather it all by, for example, selling the things it bought. A specific example: SBF decided to invest $450 million in Anthropic, an AI startup company. That investment is worth over a billion dollars today. A good investment it would seem. On the other hand, SBF apparently spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars on political candidates and campaigns, and that money is gone.
This is where the trial comes in. What the prosecutors are accusing SBF of is simply defrauding FTX customers by misappropriating the funds for Alameda’s pet projects, or his own pet projects. Fraudsters and con men have done this as long as humans have existed: take investors’ money, tell them it’s tied up in a fund that earns steady returns, and all the while use that investors’ money instead to purchase something else, like, say, a yacht or a mansion in the Bahamas.
Prosecutors call this fraud. We all call this fraud. SBF tried to make the case that he was in over his head, that it was so much money he didn’t know where it all went, and he’s ignorant. Maybe my head is in the sand on this, maybe I should have done more, but I’m not a fraudster! However, it’s hard to make this case of ignorance, especially when all your friends who worked for you and with you at FTX said that you did know the money was in the wrong place, and either ignored this fact or willfully made it so. Also, your friends all admitted their guilt to the government and made a deal with the government to avoid or limit their criminal responsibility.
And that’s exactly what the jury in SBF’s trial in federal court in New York found: SBF, you committed fraud. SBF now faces up to 110 years in federal prison, effectively a life sentence if the judge gives the maximum. Sentencing will be held in March of 2024.
If you read “Going Infinite” you get a fuller picture of SBF and the goings-on at the time of collapse. No one, probably not even SBF, can know where or how all the money was spent, that should have all along been held in FTX.
On a deeper level, why wouldn’t SBF be satisfied with owning a legitimate crypto exchange that might one day be worth a trillion dollars? I suppose it’s because of two things, as Michael Lewis notes in one of his final episodes of Season 4 of his podcast: (1) It simply wasn’t enough—more money needed to be made, faster, to be able to fund/donate/invest in all the things he wanted to invest in to continue the upward trajectory of the EA movement to help trillions of people; and (2) ego—his identity was tied up in being a trader; that’s how SBF got his start, and that’s what he was best at—exploiting inefficiencies in markets to make the most money possible. SBF didn’t seem to care all that much about crypto. He got into it simply because he saw it was a wildly inefficient market in which he could make billions of dollars.
Now he’s behind bars, maybe for life, and FTX customers—many of which lost their life savings on the exchange—are left holding the bag.
But stay tuned. Maybe they won’t be. Maybe all the money is out there, tied up in crypto wallets, or in investments, like Anthropic, that can be sold for billions of dollars. Maybe the FTX customers and its investors will get it all back. Maybe Alameda Research’s investors will get all their money back. Maybe not. But either way, the story, albeit captivating, is as old as con men themselves: you used investor money for personal purposes. Whether you used the money to combat world hunger, or to buy yourself a Ferrari, you cannot do that.
Last note: this judge seems to not completely hate Sam. He will likely hear from many of the victims in this case who lost everything. Who knows, maybe he will give him 20 years or so, and when SBF gets out of prison, maybe he can do some good with all his knowledge, albeit with limited spending money, that belongs to him and only him, and not to millions of people around the world. Or maybe he’ll put him away for life, just like Bernie Madoff (150 year sentence).
If all the money is found, and everyone is paid back, would public sentiment against SBF shift? Has it already, in light of the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and Lewis’s book reaching a wider audience? What SBF did was wrong. He is being punished for it, and rightfully so. But there’s more to this story, more to be revealed. I have just as many questions coming out of the SBF rise and fall as I did when I cracked open the first page of Lewis’s book and began following the trial. But I acknowledge that maybe it’s as simple as a bad guy going away for a very bad deed.
Comments