Imagine, for a moment, that one of the world’s most beloved and successful journalists had, in 1994, embedded himself in OJ Simpson’s world. Imagine that this writer had been reporting an uplifting rags-to-riches biography of the famous football player for months, only to find himself hunched over scribbling notes in the back of a white Ford Bronco gunning it down the freeway after the genre of Simpson’s life story jumped abruptly from sports to true crime. Imagine that Simpson had continued to confide in him from jail. Gobsmacking access. Then imagine that he released the book—destined to be a bestseller—just as Marcia Clarke and Robert Shapiro started sparring over jury selection. Imagine, in other words, the luckiest journalist in the world.
This never took place, of course. (Perhaps in some other universe, Buzz Bissinger’s My Crazy-Ass Summer With OJ is a blockbuster.) But something similar—the financial-world version of the above events, basically—has happened to Michael Lewis. His new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, is a behind-the-scenes look at how disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried made and lost a fortune through his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX and wound up on trial (right now!) for the wildest financial fiasco in contemporary history.
Lewis has been the emeritus chronicler of market mayhem in the United States for decades, starting with his semi-autobiographical 1989 debut about life on Wall Street in the ’80s, Liar’s Poker. His crowning achievement is 2010’s The Big Short, which turned the subprime mortgage crisis from a few years prior into an instant-classic thriller. Being at the right place at the right time is a talent, of course, one Lewis has honed over the years. His reputation is gilded. (Other stuff of his is probably gilded, too, considering he used to make $10 a word writing for magazines, and his work has been adapted into several major Hollywood hits.)
So the overwhelming public response to learning that Lewis had been tagging along with Bankman-Fried as his crypto world crumbled was that of unbridled excitement. It was assumed he’d get the goods. Apple was so confident it reportedly paid $5 million for the rights to Lewis’ account before it even existed. “Michael hasn’t written anything yet, but the story has become too big for us to wait,” CAA agent Michael Snyder wrote to potential buyers as he shopped the project around in November 2022.
If there’s one thing the SBF saga underlines, though, it’s how fast fortunes can change. This summer, the subjects of Lewis’ book The Blind Side got into an ugly dispute, one which punctured the book’s uplifting story about a poor Black teenager getting adopted by a wealthy white family and nurtured into an athletic star. Former NFL player Michael Oher sued the Tuohy family, alleging that they’d lied to him and profited off a sham relationship. The lawsuit cast a shadow over The Blind Side—Lewis had portrayed the Tuohys as Oher’s rescuers and champions—and then Lewis has made things worse for himself by insinuating that Oher is acting this way because he sustained brain damage playing football.
Now, Lewis has walked into a reputational buzzsaw with Going Infinite. Prior to the book’s publication, he gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which he insisted FTX was a “great real business” and appeared strikingly sympathetic to Bankman-Fried. (For someone who wrote about the perils of SBF’s lack of media training, it’s clear Lewis could’ve used a refresher.) Early critical reactions to the book have largely been stinging—I recommend reading cryptocurrency journalist Molly White’s review—and tend to ding Lewis for refusing to see his subject as a villain instead of an antihero.
It’s true that Lewis does not insist upon his subject’s criminality. Indeed, he is willing to entertain Bankman-Fried’s defense that the colossal money loss stemmed from negligence rather than malice. Still, Going Infinite is not actually the work of drooling credulity that Lewis’ most astringent critics see it as. Overall, it portrays Bankman-Fried as an arrogant weirdo who leans into his personal eccentricities to distract from his moral slipperiness. Lewis reprints Bankman-Fried’s dickhead memos to his girlfriend (SBF uses the excuse “I really don’t have a soul” to argue against committing to her) and extensively quotes his former FTX COO Constance Wang castigating Bankman-Fried’s character. (“He has absolutely zero empathy.”)
The main issue with Going Infinite isn’t that it neglects to close with something blunt-force like “… and he was definitely a bad guy—the end!” The real problem is that it simply doesn’t deliver on its supposedly revelatory potential.
Lewis got more access to Sam Bankman-Fried than anyone, but his book doesn’t tell a new story. It’s a perfectly serviceable primer for people who haven’t been following the FTX saga (I’ll probably give it to my dad, and he’ll probably love it), but for readers who have been following this case it’s a familiar yarn. Stale, even. Part of this is the inevitable consequence of choosing a subject who loves the spotlight; if you’ve read any of the prodigious reporting on SBF from the The New Yorker, Vox, Bloomberg, New York magazine, The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, and so on and so forth, there’s no big ah-ha moment to be had, just a few moderately interesting new anecdotes told in an engaging way. Anyone who has read anything about Bankman-Fried knows the same broad strokes going in as they do going out.
What’s worse, Going Infinite suffers immensely by comparison to another new book covering the SBF saga. Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux’s rollicking Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, which came out in September, is the far superior guide to understanding the FTX debacle and Bankman-Fried himself.
It is worth noting that both Faux’s and Lewis’ books open with the writers confessing that they’d been initially taken in by SBF and describe conversations they’d had with him before his downfall, but there is a key distinction. Lewis recounts how impressed he’d been without hinting that he no longer feels that way. Faux takes a different approach. The opening line is a quote from Bankman-Fried: “I’m not going to lie,” SBF promises Faux. “This was a lie,” Faux writes. This accomplishes two things: First, it signals immediately to the reader that Faux now gets it, that he knows Bankman-Fried was full of it. Second, it’s funny.
The Credulity Police could certainly ticket Faux for some transgressions; as he confesses in Number Go Up, he is the author of a softball profile of SBF for Bloomberg Businessweek, one in which he didn’t even consider scrutinizing how FTX worked as a business. (He also ends up spending $20,000 of his own money on an NFT and gets swept up in that scene’s ridiculous enthusiasm.) But Faux breezily fesses up to everything, emphasizing that he wasn’t onto Bankman-Fried before the rest of the world. “I’d like to tell you that I was the person who exposed it all, the heroic investigator who saw through one of history’s greatest frauds,” Faux writes. “But I got tricked like everyone else.”
Instead of treating Bankman-Fried like a fascinating puzzle to pore over, Faux pegs him as a cross between a nerd and a troll. Instead of keeping focus solely on SBF, he places the ex-FTX CEO within a broader menagerie of crypto freaks, including Heather Morgan, also known by her rap name “Razzlekhan.” Like Bankman-Fried, Morgan was a strange kid who grew up to be an awkward adult who lived eccentrically, loved attention, and ultimately found herself pleading “not guilty” to jaw-dropping financial crimes. (Morgan and her boyfriend were arrested for allegedly laundering $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency.)
Shortly after Morgan’s arrest, there was a rush of interest in turning her story into content—a Netflix documentary from the Tiger King crew is in the works, in addition to a podcast and a fictionalized series. Faux points this out as an example of how frenzied public interest in crypto true crime had become, not as evidence that there are layers to Morgan that are worth so much careful attention. He presents her appropriately: as an audacious buffoon, no more and no less.
While SBF appears in the opening of Number Go Up, it’s not solely focused on the FTX debacle; in fact, Faux spends more time trying to understand how the stablecoin Tether continues to function, and he recounts a harrowing trip to Cambodia to observe perhaps the most depraved pocket of the cryptocurrency world, the flat-out evil cottage industry of “pig-butchering” scams. People in the United States often find out about these scams by getting odd direct messages and texts from unknown numbers, who then spark up a conversation with them. If the conversations continue long enough, these strangers will inevitably start suggesting that they might be able to help the person at the other end make money in the crypto markets. The reality behind these messages is pitch-black: organized criminals are trafficking people and forcing them to trick Westerners into sending them cryptocurrency, beating and sometimes even killing those who fail to successfully pull off enough scams.
It is by treating Sam Bankman-Fried in this way—as just one among many weirdos making bank, neither the silliest nor the most evil—that Faux gives readers a clearer view of the man, more so than Lewis’ close-read search for meaning. In Number Go Up, Faux points out that SBF had, before his downfall, “all but admitted that much of his industry was built on bullshit.”
As a guest on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, hosted by Faux’s colleague Matt Levine, Bankman-Fried described how yield farming in crypto worked. “You start with a company that builds a box,” SBF tells Levine. He says that the company might hype the box up as life-changing, but no one knows what it actually does, nor does it matter. It might do nothing. What matters is the excitement and how the company then uses that excitement to issue a token to share in profits from however it is the box makes money, and then how the price keeps rising as excitement builds. “And then it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money,” Bankman-Fried says.
Levine appears stunned by how cynical crypto’s supposed do-gooder’s response was. “You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good,” he says.
Reading Going Infinite, it’s easy to be reminded of the box metaphor, because it’s clear that Lewis aches for Bankman-Fried to be, underneath it all, a man of misunderstood substance. This is the strength of Number Go Up: It doesn’t pretend there’s something inside, just beyond our reach. Instead, Faux explores how flimsy the whole crypto industry really is, including its fallen bigwigs—and how the deep part is the delusion that powered it. Sometimes a mysterious box is just empty.
