Jason Furman's Reviews > Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

If you have not paid much attention to the the Samuel Bankman-Fried saga this book is a terribly misleading place to start. If you have paid a lot of attention then this is a fascinating, page turning character portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried and the ups and inevitable down of his crazy gambling streak. While Michael Lewis persuaded me of nothing except possibly to reduce the (already lowish) trust I had in Michael Lewis, I am glad I read it.

On the good side, it filled in a lot of missing pieces on SBF's childhood, how he transitioned into finance, the role of Effective Altruism, the founding of Alameda Research, then FTX, and how it all developed.

Lewis almost completely trusts SBF's accounts of his own actions and his motives, although still presents an awful lot of damning careless recklessness. No where does Lewis engage with the large-scale lying and deception that SBF, at a bare minimum, practiced as FTX was imploding. Nor does he ask SBF to reflect on spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get young American men, and some women (don't forget Giselle) to be enticed into a pointless casino where the odds were always going to be stacked against them. Even if he did not steal his customer's money there would be an interesting story about how to reconcile what is basically a large-scale scam to benefit other causes that SBF considered more worthy.

Oddly, Lewis portrays SBF in childhood as a premature adult and in adulthood as a child who should not be expected to master the arcana of the adult world.

I was less bothered by the SBF hagiography than I was about the character assassination of the villains of the story: the bread crumbs planted throughout about Caroline Ellison, presenting her as somewhere between clueless and a possibly malevolent jilted ex lover who got to make all the decisions on her own, the CEO in bankruptcy John Ray and others.

And Lewis' attempt at forensic accounting are even more laughable than the random numbers that SBF spewed out on Twitter in the days after the collapse of FTX. As is his assertion that there was a sound business underlying all of this when it was clear that SBF was going to keep going double or nothing until he ended up with nothing.

I had intended to write a review about what I got out of this book and learned from it and why I enjoyed reading it, sorry, did not manage that (and I just write these reviews quickly and mostly for myself, so never particularly polished).