Thoughts on Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
In Going Infinite, Michael Lewis paints a character portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried, from his journey through college and Jane Street Capital to creating his own companies and running them into the ground. It offers a look into a mind that thinks very differently from "normal" people.
It's also a finance book, but it's breezy and fun in that characteristic Michael Lewis way. He explains the things you need to know about crypto, futures exchanges, and trading in just the right amount of detail, as he does in The Big Short, another classic.
If you don't read anything else, I'd recommend reading at least the first chapter - the way Lewis writes about Sam's conversation with Vogue's Anna Wintour is a treat. This was one of my favourite descriptive sentences, from later in the book:
[The meeting room] had a single chair and a sofa, upon which Sam stretched, barefoot, a fidget spinner on his chest. Ramnik and Nishad sat down on the floor, cross-legged. All three wore short pants, and in the room, for a moment, it felt like nap time for a small class of restless first graders.
The book is filled with character-driven moments just like this. I did not expect a company run by the richest man under 35 to be so...immature, haphazard, childish.
Sam Bankman-Fried is a particularly compelling character. He had a hyper-rational way of looking at the world, always evaluating probabilities and expected values, even in situations that did not straightforwardly lend themselves to such treatment. This trait helped him achieve success as a trader, allowing him to effectively deal with uncertainty and incomplete information. This was also the reason he leaned into the Effective Altruism movement, since it intuitively made sense to him.
He was isolated as a kid, but he did not imagine that the world revolved around his isolation. "It felt unambitious to not care about what happened to the rest of the world."
Was Sam a bad guy? This is a complicated question in general, since people contain multitudes. This book illuminates various aspects of Sam's character, with lovely anecdotes:
- Interpersonal relationships: Sam was not an easy person to talk to. He would often play video games while speaking with people and not respond clearly to their questions. Even in his love life, his most important conversations with Caroline Ellison were through bulleted memos.
- Management: He was clearly an awful people manager. At one point, there were 24 people who thought they reported to him. They thought that because FTX did not have an actual org chart.
- Mistrust of adults and structures: Sam firmly believed that people over the age of forty would not achieve anything important. Also, any adults in the room tended to force him to work in "traditional" ways, which were slow and seemed to him to be biased towards inaction. The world needed saving, and it needed saving now.
In Lewis's telling (and my interpretation of it), Sam does not come off as having malicious intent. He had very little patience for structures and strictures and had his own standards for the things he would even deign to think about. He was self-absorbed and unwilling to listen to people who may know better, or to even admit that they might actually know better. But knowingly malicious? I'm not convinced. Guilty of financial fraud though? Absolutely.
Purportedly, that financial fraud was in the service of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. The general premise of EA is this: you will spend 80,000 hours of your life working. What is the most effective use of that time? How can you maximize the impact of your work? You can work as a doctor in a third world country or you can earn a bucketload of money to pay for multiple doctors. Earning to give is a way to maximize the good you do to society.
Over time, through discussions among its members, the EA movement subtly shifted from influencing the people in the present to helping future generations.
The expected value of reducing even the minuscule likelihood of an existential threat to all future human beings is far greater than the expected value of anything you might do to save the lives of the people who currently happen to be alive.
This is where I got quite disillusioned with this philosophy. On an episode of Freakonomics, Lewis said, "Divorcing charitable acts from human sympathy feels a little weird to me." I'm inclined to agree.
Where I don't think the book did a great job is in sticking the landing. Lewis goes into great detail to ask the questions about the financial chicanery FTX and Alameda Research were involved in. Unfortunately, the book ends before the trial took place and the questions were resolved. It left a feeling that the story was incomplete, but I suppose that's not necessarily the point of a character sketch.
On the whole, this was a fun read. It doesn't rise up to the level of The Big Short, but it's still a solid read with compelling characters.