Going infinite The rise and fall of a new tycoon

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. (Oct.)

The murky world of cryptocurrency as seen through the lens of a now-jailed player. Lewis landed on Sam Bankman-Fried's story at just about the time his short-lived cryptocurrency empire was crumbling. By the author's account, Bankman-Fried seems to have had good intentions: He thought of himself as an evangelist for altruistic investing, and his fortune--and on paper he was worth billions--was intended to "address the biggest existential threats to life on earth: nuclear wars, pandemics far more deadly than Covid, artificial intelligence that turned on mankind and wiped us out, and so on." But Bankman-Fried is socially inept, a poor spokesperson for his own causes; he thinks obliquely, and to a surprising extent, according to the author, he seems to care little about money as such. There's the rub, for, as federal prosecutors are even now exploring, billions of his investors' dollars went missing. That seems not to have been uncommon. "Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers' money," Lewis writes. Was that a criminal act in this case? Lewis ventures no definitive judgment. Instead, to an annoying extent, he seems to explain it away by infantilizing Bankman-Fried, who, at the time of the collapse, "was only twenty-nine years old." That's plenty old enough to be a crook, but Lewis runs with the misunderstood-child trope all the same: "His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends"; "He could see he was different from most other kids"; "He did not have any particular hostility toward governments or banks. He just thought grown-ups were pointless." It's a curious tack that calls some of the author's reporting into question. Not Lewis' best work, but an intriguing portrait with a useful takeaway: Don't invest in crypto. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.