Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“Sam, we’re broke,” the prime minister confessed. Sam wasn’t broke. Just then Sam was the opposite of broke. Alameda Research was no longer paying loan shark interest rates to borrow tens of millions of dollars from effective altruists. The new crypto lenders like Celsius and Genesis were willing to hand Alameda Research collectively between $10 bi

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.

their dinner guests it seemed that Joe and especially Barbara were both a little afraid for, and of, their elder son. And that they were concerned about how he would ever fit into the world.

In their willingness to court the wrath of US financial regulators, the crypto exchanges fell into one of at least four categories. A small group of tiny US exchanges listed only bitcoin and ether, the two oldest coins, blessed by the SEC as commodities and openly regulated by the CFTC. (A bit oddly, the older the coin, the more people thought of i

Sam had heard of God too. “God was like a thing on TV,” he said. “God came up. But I didn’t think anyone actually believed in God.” It told you something not just about Sam but about his upbringing that he could live for almost ten years inside the United States of America without realizing that other people believed in God.

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But it would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.

That day—the morning I turned up at his desk and took an inventory—wild shit was happening. Elon Musk was buying Twitter and Sam had been on the phone with one of Musk’s advisors, Igor Kurganov. Kurganov was a Russian-born former professional poker player to whom Musk had entrusted the task, it was reported, of giving away more than $5 billion wort

If the cost of the ingredients exceeded the price of the sandwich, you bought the sandwich and sold the ingredients. If the price of the sandwich exceeded the cost of the ingredients, you bought the ingredients and sold the sandwich.