Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

It was in middle school that he became conscious of the fact that he was not a happy person. Depression took many forms, and his was of the low-level, simmering kind. “I think in general when people are depressed they know they are depressed,” he said. “My form of it was not out-of-control negative. My form of it was lack of positive.” He had a fau

Crystal Springs made no difference. “I hated it there too,” said Sam. “The whole way through. I didn’t like classes. I didn’t like my schoolmates. I was bored.” The student body was a who’s who of Silicon Valley children. (Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, was in Sam’s class.) By most standards it was a nerdy school. A jock was a person who ran track. To Sam

Very early on, Sam realized that he’d need to acquire abilities most people just took for granted. But he also knew that he could take for granted…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Part of Sam’s day was spent bringing the price of lots of ham and cheese sandwiches into line with the cost of their ingredients. He spent the first ninety minutes of every trading day just figuring out what was inside the sandwich—as overnight the precise content of the ETFs would change. The least exciting part of his job, the sandwich game was n

Any investment idea you could dream up could be expressed in the form of an ETF and sold to the investing public—in 2021 someone created an ETF that invested in companies whose products were beloved by upper-middle-class American women.

The remaining employees were also in the position of Bob’s friend, in that most of them didn’t understand what had happened. Sam had fully absorbed the Jane Street management technique of letting the rank and file see only their tiny piece of the puzzle, reserving for himself a view of the whole. Gary, though unintentionally, had done something sim

From 2019 on, he only spoke of FTX. He thought FTX was the only real threat to his position.” A threat in which he was, weirdly, the second-largest shareholder, after Sam.

The architects watched and listened and learned. They could see that these FTX people, like their leader, essentially lived in the office. Sam famously slept on the beanbag chair beside his desk in Hong Kong, but Nishad, too, had made a bed under his desk. Ordinary employees who thought that to be as successful as Sam was they must live as Sam did

In their quest to understand this strange new company, the architects nagged enough people that finally someone sent them a note with what they’d asked for in the first place: a list of what Sam Bankman-Fried wanted in his corporate mini city. “There were only three things on it,” said Ian. Sam wanted the building shaped like an F, for the benefit

Back in the 1970s, the Bahamas had been slow to create regulations for the insurance industry, and had lost out on a massive potential economic opportunity when a booming reinsurance industry set itself up in Bermuda, whose regulators had moved more quickly. By remaining entirely dependent on cruise ship tourism, the Bahamas had paid a price and ru