11 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Michael Lewis spent roughly a year with Sam Bankman-Fried before FTX collapsed in November 2022, and this book is his account of how a socially odd, hyper-rational young trader built a multibillion-dollar crypto exchange on utilitarian philosophy and personal charisma, then lost it in days. The book matters because it is the most intimate portrait available of a fraud unfolding in real time, told by a writer who was standing inside the room.
Read a little every day
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1 days · done Sat, Oct 31
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Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- Readers who followed the FTX collapse in headlines and want the human story behind the numbers - Business and finance readers interested in how ideology, culture, and risk-taking combine to produce corporate failure - Anyone curious about effective altruism and how a moral philosophy can be used to justify extreme personal ambition
What’s inside
- 1The Strange Boy Who Never Felt Ordinary Joy1 min
SBF's flat emotional affect and rigid utilitarian upbringing made him unusually willing to treat trust, money, and human relationships as interchangeable units in a single expected-value equation.
- 2Earning to Give as a Life Plan1 min
Effective altruism gave Bankman-Fried a moral framework in which becoming as rich as possible, by any legal means, counted as the most ethical career choice available to him.
- 3Jane Street and the Discipline of Expected Value1 min
Trading-floor training, not crypto itself, taught Bankman-Fried to treat every decision, including personal loyalty and institutional trust, as a bet with a calculable payoff, a habit that served him in markets but corroded him as a manager of people.
- 4The Founding and Fracture of Alameda Research1 min
Shared ideology proved insufficient to hold a trading firm together once Bankman-Fried's personal secrecy and risk tolerance collided with colleagues who wanted basic transparency.
- 5Building FTX From the Ashes of a Failed Trade1 min
FTX's rapid dominance came less from superior technology than from Bankman-Fried's willingness to back the exchange with capital from Alameda, quietly erasing the line between an exchange and a trading firm that should never share a balance sheet.
- 6The Bahamas Court1 min
FTX's communal penthouse culture in the Bahamas mistook informality and shared living quarters for accountability, when in practice it removed the ordinary boundaries that separate personal judgment from corporate oversight.
- 7Buying Legitimacy - Sports, Politics, and Philanthropy1 min
FTX's spending on stadium naming rights, celebrity endorsements, and political donations was a calculated purchase of institutional legitimacy that let a barely regulated offshore exchange resemble a blue-chip financial firm.
- 8The Ledger That Could Not Balance1 min
FTX's collapse was not a classic bank run but the sudden public exposure of a hole that had existed for months, where customer deposits had already been spent by Alameda on illiquid, underwater positions.
About Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis is a financial journalist and bestselling author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Blind Side. He specializes in narrative nonfiction that finds unconventional characters inside complex financial systems. For this book he had direct, sustained access to Sam Bankman-Fried during the year leading up to and including FTX's collapse.
