Michael Lewis on new book about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX’s collapse
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ต.ค. 2024
- Michael Lewis is the author of best-selling books turned blockbusters, including “The Big Short” and “Moneyball.” Lewis joins The Post’s opinion editor David Shipley to discuss his new book, “Going Infinite,” which chronicles the tumultuous collapse of the cryptocurrency firm FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
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Weird, looking at someone I admired saying the opposite of the reason I admired him.. Like talking about how cute and innocent your child is, right after he punched a little girl..
Micheal Lewis became friends with SBF and his family and went out to dinner with them on multiple occasions. The parents were actively involved in the fraud by helping direct fraudlent funds to politicians and political causes. The parents were also given a $15M home in the Bahamas and charged home services and purchases of household funishings to FTX. The father took a leave of absense from his job at Stanford and was paid a $1M salary by FTX. Most of his time was spent figuring out ways for FTX to avoid taxes. SBF's mother actually wrote a book proclaiming that criminals are not responsible for their crimes and shouldn't be published. "Going Infinite" was originally supposed to be a bio of SBF but once it became apparent that SBF and FTX were frauds, the book failed to accurately cover what happened. This was either due to bias or laziness on the part of Micheal Lewis.
Lewis has his head in the clouds. He’s either naive or was paid a lot of money to put together a book favourable to SBF.
I’m so sorry I bought this book before all of the reviews came out
Give a "verified buyer" review
Return it!!!
Sad to see a guy I respected ever since liars poker turn into a ponzi apologist.
sam is special. if anyone else did it , then its justifiable. Character and intent first approach.
@@elementred2359 Sam is going to be real special in prison ;)
Shame…I no longer take his journalism seriously and cast doubt on his earlier works….so disappointing.
@scottdiamond3023
Not quite, Scott. This was exactly *not* a Ponzi schme, though it is clear there was a 180-degrees solidly dishonest bit of accountancy at the centre of the operation.
The money SBF was misusing was the profits, more technically the encashed capital gains, of the rise in Bitcon's market price -- and the "customers," i.e. the gamblers playing in this casino, are going to come out of it all with hefty profits.
Wonderful Freudian slip in there, David: Bitcon for Bitcoin. 😆🤣😅
It was accidental, I swear! 😇😇😇
Michael Lewis didn’t address the other issue that SBF knowingly used (stole) FTX customer money to fund real estate buys, endorsement deals and speculative investments among other things.
It was proven in the court by a string of emails and testimonies from SBF's lieutenants. Michael didn't have access to those when he was writing the book.
@@tiararoxeanne1318then don't write a whole narrative with nothing to support those claims
@@Stutterstun What claim are you talking about here?
@@tiararoxeanne1318 the revelations from the trial, plus the immediate guilty verdict, should really tank the sales of his book. If I bought one, I would be demanding a refund asap.
Oh! Now I get it. I thought Sam's problem was that he stole billions. Now, I know that it's because people don't understand him. Thanks Michael.
He's a woke thief.
Lewis out here showing his hand. We know where some of Sam’s 8bil went then
I've been a fan of Lewis in the past but I think he's looking like a fool this time. Won't be wasting time or money on the book.
I don't know if I can read any of him books from this point on. Will re-read Moneyball one day though. What a book!!!
I think it's a bit more complicated than that, Walker. It looks to me as though Lewis was genuinely deluded by SBF's cloud of assorted lies, self-delusions, and deeply strangeness.
I avoided the book at the time because it was clear to me, a week after SBF's arrest, that its thesis was incorrect, or at least that what Lewis was saying in all his TV interviews was a scramble to save a couple of years' of his invested time, He'd found himself with lemons and was trying to make lemonade while in danger of ending up with vinegar.
His current, mid-2024, stance, "You folks make up your minds," seems to me, uh, disingenuous.
SBF was utterly dishonest, but then the entire crypto-currency racket is a shuck and a jive.
Meself, I look forward to the utter collapse of Bitcoin. Even the innocent people who will get hurt are unproductive greedheads, so fug 'em. But no, I'm not sellling it short because it will fluctuate like GameStop as it goes, and half the short sellers are going to get hurt as badly as the bulls.
How do I invest in the paper mills selling to the money printers of Zimbabwe? (And how do they get their invoices paid?)
Friendly reminder that this guy wrote The Blind Side
At least a half dozen things went wrong here (lives have been ruined) and the roads of responsibility lead back to Bankman-Fried. Whether Lewis likes it or not, that is a major part of the story. You can’t separate Lance Armstrong using his fame to raise funds for cancer research from the nefarious means used to achieve that fame…nor Madoff… (nor a handful of other notorious historical figures) just because they’re “interesting characters”. BF’s end does not justify his means to achieve it and yes, there is a third act here related to missing money and responsibility (how much is being determined in a courtroom right now) that cannot be glossed over because the author loves the concept of “effective altruism”.
You left out the participation of Ontario Teacher's Pension Fund (300 billion), Stanford and MIT. This was a scripted plan by the Dep. of Dis-edu. The objective is total destruction of the economy. Trump's Lockdown and dispersion of $8.3 TRILLION to digital cutouts and PPP, was the opening gambit. Theranos was to play a major role in the "Pandemic", but had to be discarded, (That is how Theranos got so far). Theranos and SBF are part of the same script. The continued success of Indian Scammers is also part of the income redistribution.
A person's overarching intentions are paramount when evaluating their conduct. The problem is that we are terrible at it. We prefer to judge others based on how things appear to us as they are happening, using the most convenient reasoning coupled with an emotional reaction. This is rarely accurate, and the more we take action upon the conclusion we've drawn , the more difficult it is to see let alone accept any other possibilities. If we had all known the purpose of FTX and it's founders ahead of the events that led to it's bankruptcy, it would be journalists at a now defunct company named Coindesk that were just convicted, not Sam..... because everything Sam did would have been seen in a different light. We would know better than to assume a narrative of theft and personal enrichment. A team of 10 prosecutors trying to demonstrate their ability to convict, can make Mother Theresa look like Hitler.
You clearly didn't read the book.
@@mizzounyc Clearly, I did not - nor will I. Looking at the interviews that the author has done to promote the book, clearly the author lost his objectivity. Enjoyed Liar's Poker, enjoyed The Big Short, but I'm not going to bother with this.
How in the world can you critique a book you haven't read? If you had bothered to read it, before offering your opinion you would discover something I found just plain weird that isn't widely discussed: SBF is pretty substantially mentally impaired. The "quirks" people called eccentric paint a larger portrait of someone who has a narrow band of intelligence re: Math ability, but the fact that no one placed any guardrails on someone who clearly has substantial mental deficits and his bizarre behavior(nonstop lying included that is extensively documented in the book) get chalked up to being eccentric genius is kind of wild.
@@sdh41
SBF's parents were lousy parents. They let thier son live such a lonely life. They were probably main connection to the world. At one point his father complained about his $200,000.00 salary per year and added his mother to the email to pressure SBF.
His parents used him like an experiment. Used him for their enrichment. I hope they go away longer then him, because they deserve to.
Exactly. His father is an expert in compliance. He should have warned his son instead of participating in the scheme.
I feel sorry for the people who bought his book. Michael Lewis - Apologist for Hire!
An Apologist always. Always. The thing is it has begun to smell. Then again his subjects smell bad, but Lewis tries to spray perfume all over them. They still stink.
Shame on you guys.
LOL Michael Lewis didn't even rewrite most of his SBF hagiography after the downfall. What a joke.
@@fyt54321 also the way he defended SBF on the question of losing customers funds by simply saying that money was of speculators. I didn't lose a dime but I can feel the pain of people losing their yrs of hard earned cash, life savings and now the depression and anxiety they might be going through.
Michael Lewis NEVER really discusses anything, he's ALWAYS right... ... ...
I think mr lewis has destroyed his own credibility by hitching his wagon to SBF
No need to think it, we know it.
His parents, being the only adults in the room, were intimately involved with the embezzlement of funds from FTX customers. They are being sued by FTX and their testimony in court should be as revealing as their son's. Their reaction in court to their son's guilty verdict was just an act bc they must have known what their son was up to for years. The father was coaching his son on how to take money and avoid taxes and the mother was just interested in "How much is in it for me and my PAC?"
they were all adults
Washington compost
Okay, so, sure. Maybe SBF ran a chaotic marketplace because he thrives on chaos, and maybe he didn't have a CTO because he thought he didn't need one, and maybe they didn't keep good records because they were naive, and maybe the funds got mixed because the two companies shared a bank initially, and maybe SBF is such a genius that he can game and take meetings at the same time, and maybe he's so smart that he doesn't need to prepare for them...
Or:
SBF is an incompetent gaming addict with ADHD who recklessly gambled with stolen money, in a company structured like a rat's warren to avoid oversight and accountability.
Who's to say?
Why is it so shocking that someone who has autism has spent 18 years alone
He has certainly lost his reputation. At least with me.
The co-occurrence of autism and psychopathy is very rare, but it seems that SBF may indeed qualify. It might explain why the fraud he committed seems so cartoonish? He is indeed a very interesting character, and I'm glad Michael Lewis wrote this book. As fascinating as SBF's pathology is, it's also equally fascinating how society rearranged itself around him. It would be interesting to perform some neuroimaging on SBF and compare the results to those with established diagnoses of autism and psychopathy.
Lewis lost all credibility he still got left, if any...
Lol Lewis is at ground zero for a modern financial flim flam. People(crypto marks who lost their shirt) are mad Lewis wasn't mean enough to Sam Bankrun Fraud.
Michael Lewis got fooled by SBF. Sad.
I don't he's going to thrive in a prison experience 😂
This kid should not have been allowed to do all this without his parents being better people. Their son needed guidance.
I think he displayed the ethics of the modern Elite universities in America. His parents gave him guidance, just the wrong type.
The best grifters steal your money and at the end of it all you thank them for the experience.
When someone intelligent starts saying things so illogic, and goes to the point of writing a useless book I start thinking something I cannot even mention...about what I think is really behind it. And you know there is only 1 thing capable of destroying all the logic in a man, and that thing is surprisingly green coloured.
Oh, I thought you were going to say he fell in love with SBF 😁
It would be helpful if you could point out in what minutes he said the illogical things. Otherwise, you sound like a hater without proof, who ironically is showing as the one who illogical here.
I have an example, he said that Sam's problem was that people don't understand him. No one gives a shit if they understand him. They want their money back. He stole it. @@tiararoxeanne1318
After watching this video you might want to read the article “FTX Had Many Bad Spreadsheets” by Matt Levine. It’s hard to view SBF as just sloppy and over his head given the information that has come to light.
I agree completely. If the idiot had hired 5 people from the backroom operations of any wall street bank and empowered them to keep it straight, he could have avoided a lot of this.
Word on the All in Podcast from Chamath was that when he spoke to someone at FTX over the phone he advised that they get a board of directors and he was told to 'Fuck off.' @@timmurphy5736
Someone should write a book that complements Michael Lewis’s book and provides the contextual information that came out during the trial of SBF. Without that information it is hard to get at the fundamental truth of who SBF is and what he really did. Clearly there was a lot of cheating / delusion going on - without accurate measurement or with deliberately inaccurate measurement SBF was able to make many claims and representations that turned out not to be true.
You left out the participation of Ontario Teacher's Pension Fund (300 billion), Stanford and MIT. This was a scripted plan by the Dep. of Dis-edu. The objective is total destruction of the economy. Trump's Lockdown and dispersion of $8.3 TRILLION to digital cutouts and PPP, was the opening gambit. Theranos was to play a major role in the "Pandemic", but had to be discarded, (That is how Theranos got so far). Theranos and SBF are part of the same script. The continued success of Indian Scammers is also part of the income redistribution.
It's not hard to understand what went wrong. He setup an exchange without proper governance and controls that befit handling other people's money. He then allowed his hedge fund to take other people's money that should have been sitting in client accounts at the exchange and gamble with it. When the gambling went bad, he had a hole he couldn't fill at the exchange. This is very much like what happened at MF Global when their broker entity was allowed to use client funds at their clearing firm to back up bets Corzine was making in the bond market. When the bets turned against them, they had a hole in the place the client funds were. Arrogant leaders who don't want to take the time or make the effort to understand the reasons for control processes and control environments end up with these shitty outcomes for their clients.
@@timmurphy5736 My point was that readers of Michael Lewis’s book may not be able to connect the dots that you laid out because Michael Lewis chose not to give them enough information to do so. Only people who look at more information and have a financial / analytical background will figure things out. I wonder if Michael Lewis himself is able to connect the dots on this.
@@slovokia Yes I see your point. My suspicion is that he doesn't want to because they are not sexy dots that will sell books.
You ignore the institutional graft and human perversity of the parents of Caroline and Sam. These people were mentors of the highest status, working their lives at top educational historical institutions. OTPF started Sam off with $100 million, the trial is hiding the true scale of the conspiracy. Show me how Sam's and Caroline's parents are innocent!@@timmurphy5736
The book was an exciting and pleasurable read but it was clearly rose-tinted towards SBF while providing essentially no meaningful criticism, or sharing all that much negative sentiment towards one of the biggest scammers in history who resulted in untold misery for many. Lewis' approach seemed to be to minimise Sam down to a well-meaning kiddo who accidentally found himself with more power than he could handle, while he painted crypto as just this wild west casino with what seemed to me like an implication of "they deserved it". Crypto may be a casino but so is much of finance. For that reason, while much and perhaps all the information was true, it felt more like a fictional story, a dramatic arc for pleasure rather than accessible long-form financial journalism which is Lewis' brand.
ML lost my respect
Ýou should ask George Lerner why Sam Trabucco left Alameda Research... That would be really interesting to know!
I see it differently. Am I wrong? Page 40 (end 2nd paragraph) of ‘Going Infinite’’ should read “there was an 11-in-36 chance that, with a roll of two dice, you’d get at least one three”. The chance that you’d get two threes is 1-in-36. The chance therefore that, with a roll of two dice, you’d get one three (but not two threes) is 10-in-36.
Prob of rolling a three on the first try)x(Prob of not rolling a three on the second try) + (Prob of not rolling a three on the second try)x(Prob of rolling a three on the first try) + (Prob of rolling a three on the first try) * (chance of rolling a three on the second try = 11/36
This covers all the outcomes where at least one three is rolled.
(1/6*5/6) +(5/6*1/6) + (1/6 *1/6) = 11/36
At least one 3. Two 3s qualify
So much of this is provably incorrect and what's left is not provable and also unlikely.
Matt Levine's remark that many reviewers of Michael Lewis' book complain that Lewis does not point out that SBF is Guilty and Bad. He is probably right, but as far as I am aware the trial of SBF is not yet over? The jury still has to find SBF guilty or not guilty?
The only thing on trial was the US judicial system. If SBF got let off it would have been a total miscarriage of justice.
I wonder what Lewis will do now that he's no longer a best selling author?
I came here to watch the train crash. In HORROR. What would Lewis say if he lost ten million in FTX??? He just doesn't give a shit about all the people that got their lives ruined by SBF. His SBF infatuation is on another level. He's running rings around himself trying to pump up his BS. All this from a man that left wall street because it was so slimy. Now, he is covered in slime from hugging SBF so much and falling for the trickster just like everyone else.
Without rejecting 'grown-up wisdom' the human race would never had made any progress. Finding stuff out yourself adds to the spice of life 😃
There's' grown up wisdom,' and then there's 'accessory to a crime.' Big difference there. And SBF will have decades in prison to savor the spice of life his parents coached him into.
Sam Bankman-Fried is a well defined, (by Michael Lewis), example of someone who has found something to believe in, lived the experience, and because it's so easy to fool yourself of a systematic belief structure that is presented to the following public as a true statement of existence, (the beliefs are created in this way), that it's only when tested in fact that the self delusion is made apparent.
It's nothing new.
math ppl into money ppl ?? what a load of crap.
Really to late to read this book. What a fiction.
its his Magic Jew
I
I
I
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Michael Lewis.
I was told you don’t have a movie yet. Shhhhmmm
❤💛💚💙 SBF is innocent. Let him go! He did nothing wrong! FUD!!