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

Going Infinite : The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023) by Michael Lewis is the latest book from the master of narrative nonfiction. Lewis continues his incredible run of finding extremely interesting characters and situations to write about. Lewis also writes well and his books are entertaining reading.

This time around Lewis writes about Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and the creation of the crypto exchange FTX and it’s incredible fall. The book’s publication also coincides with the trial of SBF.

Lewis generally finds people who he can write about as heroes. His characters typically have an insight and have faith in their own ideas and show the world. In Going Infinite this is far from the case.

SBF’s story is incredible. He is a highly intelligent child of two Stanford academics. As a child he was odd and was passionate about games with an appropriate degree of randomness. He was highly rational and had problems with more subjective subjects like English. SBF was very good at math and went to MIT to study physics. At MIT SBF became acquainted with the Effective Altruist (EA) movement. SBF quickly got a job as a trader at a secretive trading firm called Jane Street. There he did very well and was on track to earn millions.

But instead he decided that crypto offered great opportunities to people with trading skills. He founded Alameda Research. He founded the firm with a number of ex Jane Street people and also with a number of Effective Altruists. First Alameda failed but then SBF kept the firm and kept it going and making profits. He went to Hong Kong and met other crypto enthusiasts including Changpeng Zhao (CZ) the co-founder of Binance. CZ is currently worth 13 Bn. SBF then decided to found an exchange which became FTX.

FTX became incredibly successful and SBF became one of the richest people on the planet. He spent prolifically and started to try and funds were dispersed for Effective Altruism projects.

Eventually things turned south and a crypto crash caused FTX, which was making wild amounts of money, to collapse. Alameda Research and FTX had their finances intertwined. FTX was extremely chaotic and poorly run.

Going Infinite is a fun read. There are caveats however. Perhaps, for the first time Lewis has been conned. Lewis is also aware of this and make astute comments. But still, Going Infinite is engrossing.