Going Infinite
The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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4.1 • 54 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
*INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*
*NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*
‘Extraordinary’ The Observer
‘A stupefyingly pleasurable book to read’ New Yorker
‘Lewis’s storytelling is as good as ever’ The Economist
From the #1 bestselling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the high-octane story of the enigmatic figure at the heart of one of the 21st century's most spectacular financial collapses
'I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. "One hundred and fifty billion dollars," he finally said-though he added that he had use for "infinity dollars"...'
Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just rich. Before he turned thirty he'd become the world's youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.
Then it all fell apart.
Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?
Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted 'thinking machine', and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spectacular collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its eccentric billionaire founder Sam Bankman-Fried is sifted in this rollicking investigation. Bestseller Lewis (The Big Short) casts Bankman-Fried as a stranger-than-fiction figure with no social instincts (he had to train himself to display facial expressions when coworkers complained about his unchanging blank gaze), a gift for making complex financial trades with iffy data under severe time pressure, and a philosophy of "effective altruism" that prodded him to accumulate an 11-figure fortune in order to give it away to good causes. (One save-the-world project was offering Donald Trump money to not run for president in 2024, Lewis reports, a scheme that fizzled when Trump allegedly demanded a $5 billion payment.) Lewis's narrative is a symphony of comedic discordance—a scene of Bankman-Fried frantically playing video games while Vogue editor Anna Wintour lobbies him to attend the Met Gala is a gem—that coalesces into a reconstruction of FTX's labyrinthine bankruptcy. Striking a remarkably sympathetic tone, Lewis even implies Bankman-Fried was railroaded and his misdeeds blown out of proportion. ("From a distance, it became almost taboo to raise any doubts about the nature of Sam's crime. Up close, it was hard not to have such doubts.") The result is a vastly entertaining and sure to be debated saga of money-making at its weirdest.
