Then there was Sam’s equity stake in FTX, which was very real indeed. A large number of venture capitalists had paid $2.3 billion for a mere 6 percent of it. Sam had good reason to believe that he might now sell an even smaller piece for several billion more to an even bigger group. FTX underpinned his growing empire: a real business with booming

In 2018, trading $40 million in capital, Alameda Research had generated $30 million in profits. Their effective altruist investors took half, leaving behind $15 million. Five million of that was lost to payroll and severance for the departing crowd; another $5 million was lost to expenses. On the remaining $5 million they’d paid taxes, and so,

the crypto lenders were happy to lend him billions of dollars against his FTT, so, to get his hands on cash, he didn’t need to sell it.

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the moment he was losing money, they turned on him—and didn’t want to hear his answers to the questions they asked him.

They’d even paid their taxes. (Sam had brought in his dad to help with that.) And they resumed making millions of dollars a month in trading profits. They weren’t the same company, however. They were no longer a random assortment of effective altruists. They were a small team who had endured an alarming drama and now trusted Sam. He’d been right

After his summer internship, he’d set out to address his superiors’ criticisms. He’d long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn’t feel the emotion didn’t mean he couldn’t convey it. He’d started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to

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Ninety percent of those accused of crimes by the US government in 2022 had accepted a deal and pleaded guilty. Less than half of 1 percent had been acquitted.