When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything. Their desire freed you up from having to pay attention to them, which was good, because Sam had only so much attention to give.

Before he could do any of this, he needed to get rid of CZ. CZ still owned the stake in FTX that he had bought in late 2019 for $80 million. Relations between Binance and FTX had since deteriorated into simmering resentment. Binance was the class bully, FTX the class nerd,…

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

In the first eighteen months of FTX’s existence, there had been several other dustups with Binance of this sort. CZ developed what three of his employees at the time described as an obsession with his new rival. He’d ask staff for regular reports about FTX, and speak of FTX in ways he would not of the other exchanges.

Of course, winning one out of five congressional races meant you lost the other four. Sam’s political portfolio resembled his venture capital portfolio: in pursuit of crazy rewards, it took what, after the fact, looked like insane risks. In a very short time, Sam’s money had bankrolled some of the most spectacular failures in the history of politic

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

to a utilitarian abortion looks a lot like birth control. In the end murder is just a word and what’s important isn’t whether you try to apply the word to a situation but the facts of the situation that caused you to describe it as murder in the first place. And in the case of abortion few of the things that make murder so bad apply.

Sam was all in on the sacrifice. Caroline Ellison wasn’t like that. She lacked confidence in herself. “She was borrowing her ego from Sam because she lacked one,” said George. “Sam gave her real inner strength.” In George’s EA patient population, Caroline defined the other end of the spectrum of willingness to sacrifice for her principles. When she

which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the math.

The business hadn’t even really been Sam’s idea but Tara’s. Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors. Through the spring and summer of 2017, the two of them were on the phone constantly. At some point Sam revealed his romantic interest in her; at some o