Overview

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own--until it all came undone.

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Reviews

"Going Infinite is a stupefyingly pleasurable book to read. It's perfectly paced, extremely funny, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting... What he began with Moneyball has come into full flower with Going Infinite. Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized, at least here and there, by uneven and unreliable information. Perhaps Lewis's book should encourage an update, however minuscule, in our own priors.--Gideon Lewis-Kraus ""The New Yorker"" Going Infinite is a portrait of grandiose ambitions, youthful arrogance, and the distorting power of money...[Lewis] remains the greatest living exponent of the plain style in reporting. His eye for detail is unsurpassed... And as a chronicle of collective delusion - a modern version of the Dutch tulip mania -Going Infinite is an instant classic... Michael Lewis deserves huge credit for capturing [SBF] in all his infinite weirdness... Mark Zuckerberg, another boy genius in ratty shoes, once described Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Sam Bankman-Fried was a Seth Rogen character who fell into a tulip field circa 1634. Another one will be along in a minute. We never learn.--Helen Lewis ""The Atlantic"" Leave it to [Lewis] to have unfettered access to one of the best financial stories to come around in years.... There are, of course, the priceless anecdotes from the book... including S.B.F.'s inane conversation with Anna Wintour about whether he would attend and potentially sponsor the annual Met Gala--""Yup!""--and the revelations about his relationship with Ellison, the consequences of which are now playing out in court....Going Infinite, is a delightful read, highly entertaining, often insightful and amusing. It's a character study of one of the most notorious financial figures of our time.... [Lewis] does not attempt in any way to try to figure out how S.B.F. pulled off what he is accused of doing, other than by revealing that he is one strange dude, lacking empathy, and capable, apparently, of fleecing billions from his customers.--Willam Cohan ""Puck"" Lewis' storytelling is as good as ever... In the past, Mr Lewis has focused on little-known people doing extraordinary things. This time his subject is notorious... Mr Bankman-Fried's hyper-rationality sets him apart from everyone. He views people not as good or bad, but as ""probability distributions"" around a mean... By tolerating the idea that hyper-rationalists cannot make sense of the rules of the game the way most people do, Mr Lewis implicitly asks readers to reconsider whatever they thought they knew about Mr Bankman-Fried. In the court of public opinion, he is already convicted. That's reason enough to give this book a read.-- ""Economist"" Michael Lewis has an uncanny instinct for a big story, and is now right in the thick of the action again... Reading Lewis can feel like being a passenger in an expertly piloted bobsleigh. You're moving so fast down the mountain, but you know you're going to be delivered safe and sound - hot chocolate waiting at the bottom. There is no need to stress, only to thrill to the scenery as it hurtles past.-- ""New Statesman"" Michael Lewis is the world's finest financial storyteller...Going Infinite is at its best in describing Bankman-Fried's rise... Lewis is equally sharp on how the effective altruism movement shifted its priorities, from donating to prevent disease and mortality in the global south to worrying about (putative) trillions of human lives across the galaxy in the distant future.--Steven Poole ""Daily Telegraph"" In November 2022, FTX collapsed in a matter of days after it suffered billions of dollars in customer withdrawals, sending shockwaves through the crypto world. To make sense of all this, with perfect timing, comes Michael Lewis...Going Infinite is his superbly detailed picture of the man behind it...So where might the money have gone? We still don't entirely know, though Lewis offers some preliminary balance sheet calculations ? which remain more detailed than anything FTX ever published.-- ""Evening Strandard"""

Author Information

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

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