Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Sam had first met CZ not long after his move to Hong Kong at the end of 2018. Binance was looking for crypto companies to pay $150,000 apiece to sponsor its conference in early 2019 in Singapore, and Sam stepped in with the money. CZ had rewarded him by appearing onstage with him, and ever after, Sam was to say, “That’s what gave us legitimacy in c
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Jane Street, as Sam put it, was “just a place where people come to work each day to play some games and increase the number in their bank account, because what the fuck else are they going to do with their lives?” Alameda Research, as he was calling the new firm, was going to be different: a vessel to save some vast number of lives.
Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Without ever tapping outside capital, Jane Street had gone from a few traders with a few million dollars, in 1999, to roughly two hundred traders working with several billion dollars, in 2014. One big reason was ETFs, whose global value had grown from less than $100 billion to $2.2 trillion (on its way to more than $10 trillion in 2022).
Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
At any rate, the people sitting around Sam’s living room and talking about where Sam’s money was being spent weren’t talking about buying bed nets for children in Africa, to prevent malaria. They were looking for clever ways to reduce existential risk. The sums they were able to give away were about to increase dramatically—or so they all imagined.
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Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
And yet it still obviously had lots of room to grow. Its biggest rival, Binance, had five times the trading volume of FTX, which meant that it likely had roughly five times FTX’s revenues and five times FTX’s market value. The experts who tried to determine the present value of rich people had trouble putting a number on CZ’s. No one was sure how m
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