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Molly White's Reviews > Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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Full review
In Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite, he compares FTX’s CEO-in-bankruptcy’s attempts to sift through the remains of the fallen FTX empire to an ignorant amateur archaeologist trying to fabricate believable explanations for artifacts beyond his understanding.
A writer of Lewis’s caliber presumably also knows of many parables about people who get too close to a subject to be able to view it objectively, too, but those don’t earn a place in the book. At no point does Lewis seem to reflect on whether the six months he spent shadowing Bankman-Fried prior to the CEO’s fall from grace — during which Lewis thought he was writing the story of a nerdy tycoon’s rise to unimaginable wealth and influence in a possible new sector of finance — may have influenced his own evaluation of the situation. The time Lewis spent observing Bankman-Fried in the company’s ritzy Bahamian offices, joining him on travels abroad, and even accompanying him to parties where they brushed elbows with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio certainly seems to have endeared the fallen billionaire and now accused fraudster to Lewis, who throughout the book continuously overlooks red flags and omits context that would paint a very different picture.
To this day, Bankman-Fried claims that the collapse of FTX, and the more than $8 billion in missing customer funds, is all the result of mismanagement and sloppy record-keeping, but not intentional fraud. By writing a book that largely backs up Bankman-Fried’s claims, Lewis seems to be staking his own substantial reputation on this being the truth — or, at least, on the government being unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it isn’t. If Bankman-Fried is convicted in the upcoming trial, Lewis’s book will take an awkward place on the shelves of history.
In Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite, he compares FTX’s CEO-in-bankruptcy’s attempts to sift through the remains of the fallen FTX empire to an ignorant amateur archaeologist trying to fabricate believable explanations for artifacts beyond his understanding.
A writer of Lewis’s caliber presumably also knows of many parables about people who get too close to a subject to be able to view it objectively, too, but those don’t earn a place in the book. At no point does Lewis seem to reflect on whether the six months he spent shadowing Bankman-Fried prior to the CEO’s fall from grace — during which Lewis thought he was writing the story of a nerdy tycoon’s rise to unimaginable wealth and influence in a possible new sector of finance — may have influenced his own evaluation of the situation. The time Lewis spent observing Bankman-Fried in the company’s ritzy Bahamian offices, joining him on travels abroad, and even accompanying him to parties where they brushed elbows with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio certainly seems to have endeared the fallen billionaire and now accused fraudster to Lewis, who throughout the book continuously overlooks red flags and omits context that would paint a very different picture.
To this day, Bankman-Fried claims that the collapse of FTX, and the more than $8 billion in missing customer funds, is all the result of mismanagement and sloppy record-keeping, but not intentional fraud. By writing a book that largely backs up Bankman-Fried’s claims, Lewis seems to be staking his own substantial reputation on this being the truth — or, at least, on the government being unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it isn’t. If Bankman-Fried is convicted in the upcoming trial, Lewis’s book will take an awkward place on the shelves of history.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
October 3, 2023
– Shelved
