GOING INFINITE

The murky world of cryptocurrency as seen through the lens of a now-jailed player.

Lewis landed on Sam Bankman-Fried’s story at just about the time his short-lived cryptocurrency empire was crumbling. By the author’s account, Bankman-Fried seems to have had good intentions: He thought of himself as an evangelist for altruistic investing, and his fortune—and on paper he was worth billions—was intended to “address the biggest existential threats to life on earth: nuclear wars, pandemics far more deadly than Covid, artificial intelligence that turned on mankind and wiped us out, and so on.” But Bankman-Fried is socially inept, a poor spokesperson for his own causes; he thinks obliquely, and to a surprising extent, according to the author, he seems to care little about money as such. There’s the rub, for, as federal prosecutors are even now exploring, billions of his investors’ dollars went missing. That seems not to have been uncommon. “Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers’ money,” Lewis writes. Was that a criminal act in this case? Lewis ventures no definitive judgment. Instead, to an annoying extent, he seems to explain it away by infantilizing Bankman-Fried, who, at the time of the collapse, “was only twenty-nine years old.” That’s plenty old enough to be a crook, but Lewis runs with the misunderstood-child trope all the same: “His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends”; “He could see he was different from most other kids”; “He did not have any particular hostility toward governments or banks. He just thought grown-ups were pointless.” It’s a curious tack that calls some of the author’s reporting into question.

Not Lewis’ best work, but an intriguing portrait with a useful takeaway: Don’t invest in crypto.