Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

between the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2021, in four rounds of fundraising, they sold roughly 6 percent of the company for $2.3 billion. Roughly one hundred fifty different venture capital firms invested.

“Fault is just a construct of human society. It serves different purposes for different people. It can be a tool to discourage bad actions; an attempt to recover pride in the face of hardship, an outlet for rage, and many more things. I guess maybe the most important definition—to me, at least—is how did everyone’s actions reflect on the probabilit

To put it another way: people misread him, decided that he couldn’t be trusted, and then refused to change their minds about him. He needed to do a better job of helping others to solve the puzzle.

Global stocks traded $600 billion a day, crypto was now trading $200 billion each day, and the gap was closing. Inside of eighteen months, FTX had gone from nothing to the world’s fifth-biggest crypto exchange, and every day, it was seizing market share from its competitors. They were now the only crypto exchange making a priority of obtaining lice

Like everything else about Alameda Research, this bid by the firm’s other managers to get rid of Sam proved complicated. For a start, Sam owned the entire company. He’d structured it so that no one else had equity, only promises of equity down the road.

At least some of his fellow effective altruists aimed to bankrupt Sam, almost as a service to humanity, so that he might never be allowed to trade again.

yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. Between the summer of 2014, when he started at Jane Street, and the summer of 2017, he’d taken no vacation. He’d actually worked ten days when US markets were closed—the action in foreign markets was especially great when US traders weren’t payin

The venture capitalists could see how fast FTX was growing—that they were wildcatters sitting on a gusher—but were unsure if what they were seeing was closer to the last gallon of oil than the first. Was it just a big trade that would go away with the crypto craze, or was Sam building something enduring? If the latter, he’d need access to American

Inside of crypto world, none of Ramnik’s qualities made much of a difference and indeed they might have been a disadvantage. Outside of it, they were invaluable.