10 Juicy Nuggets From the New Sam Bankman-Fried Book

In a stroke of transcendently good luck for Michael Lewis, halfway into reporting his latest book on former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried his protagonist was indicted for allegedly masterminding one of the largest frauds in history.

On Tuesday, just as Bankman-Fried’s trial was commencing in New York, Lewis released the biography, which paints its subject as a frenetic, emotionless, and largely well-intentioned genius. Already, the tone of the book is generating controversy, including for Lewis’ assertion in an interview with 60 Minutes that Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, had a “a great real business” in contrast to a Ponzi scheme run by the likes of Bernie Madoff. (Bankman-Fried is accused of misappropriating billions of dollars of customer deposits.)

Some reporters are also pushing back on Lewis’ claim that Bankman-Fried considered paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president, arguing that the idea was “basically a joke” or a “thought experiment.”

Nonetheless, the book provides an up-close account of FTX’s spectacular demise, and of a founder who had considered himself an intellectual outlier since early childhood. Below are 10 takeaways.

He was peculiar, even as a kid.

Bankman-Fried’s only sibling, younger brother Gabe, didn’t have much to say about their shared childhood. “We weren’t close growing up,” he said. “I would interact with him as another tenant in my house.” Bankman-Fried’s parents, meanwhile, appeared concerned about his precociousness and lack of social skills. To some outsiders, they seemed “both a little afraid for, and of, their eldest son,” Lewis writes.

There were longstanding concerns about his management skills.

Well before FTX’s implosion, some of Bankman-Fried’s executives grew so alarmed about his haphazard approach to risk management that they tried to force him out or prevent him from trading more crypto. They viewed efforts to “bankrupt Sam” as almost a “service to humanity,” Lewis recounts.

He got creative in his effort to skirt regulations.

Sale limits set by South Korean authorities made it difficult for Bankman-Fried to take advantage of price gaps in the crypto markets, so he and his team brainstormed cockamamie ways to get around the rules. Among the proposals: “buying a jumbo jet and flying it back and forth from Seoul, filled with South Koreans carrying suitcases” filled with $10,000 of local currency. It was an absurd notion. To make it work, Bankman-Fried said, “We needed like ten thousand South Koreans a day.”

He wielded enormous influence in the Bahamas.

At one point, Lewis says, Bankman-Fried toyed with paying off the Bahamas’ national debt—all $9 billion if it. Following the country’s 2021 election, Lewis claims, Bankman-Fried was “the first person the prime minister had wanted to meet.”

Forbes, which put him on its cover, asked if he wanted to buy the media company.

Forbes added Bankman-Fried to its list of the world’s richest people in 2021, with a net worth north of $20 billion. According to Lewis, the publication’s executives were so taken by his wealth that they “were soon asking if he might like to buy their company, too.”

He really pissed off Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The famously prickly fashion editor asked Bankman-Fried to attend the Met Gala—which she oversees—as her “special guest,” though Lewis says the young billionaire was playing a video game during their video call. Bankman-Fried apparently accepted the invitation, only to back out. Wintour’s aides allegedly flipped out, declaring that he would “never set foot in fashion again!” Bankman-Fried said he detested the outlet’s values: “There are very few businesses that I have strong moral objections to, and hers is one of them.” (A Vogue spokesperson said these claims contain inaccuracies—though she did not specify what was untrue—and added that the publication had not been contacted for factchecking.)

Bankman-Fried viewed himself as a terrible romantic partner.

This was perhaps prescient, considering that his former girlfriend Caroline Ellison—who ran his hedge fund—later pleaded guilty to federal charges and is expected to testify against him in his trial. In 2021, as Ellison and Bankman-Fried were contemplating their entanglement (via very formal written exchanges), he confided to her that, “In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul,” adding, “there’s a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

His peers were not emotionally prepared for FTX’s 2022 collapse.

One executive who later pleaded guilty, Nishad Singh, was viewed as a “suicide risk” during the turmoil. He left the company’s offices in the Bahamas to be looked after by his parents in San Francisco.

Lewis seems to view FTX’s new CEO, John J. Ray III, as clueless.

Ray, an antagonist of Bankman-Fried, has been steering the crypto exchange through bankruptcy proceedings. But Lewis thinks the new CEO is at times out of his depth in the arcane world of crypto, likening him to “an amateur archaeologist [who] had stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization.”

Bankman-Fried couldn’t even socialize with his guard dog.

While spending time under home confinement at his parents’ place in California—until he was jailed for engaging in possible witness tampering this summer—Bankman-Fried’s parents got him a German shepherd guard dog, Sandor, that had been “trained to kill on command.” One problem: the dog was trained in German, and Bankman-Fried did not know the commands (his parents did). Lewis grew concerned about the unlikely but plausible scenario in which the animal turned on its owner, writing, “it would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.”