There is a suspense embedded in Michael Lewis’ account of the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried that makes an already fascinating book more delicious. As followers of the collapse of the crypto king’s empire will know, halfway through the writing of the book, the author’s task changed dramatically from profiling one of the world’s youngest billionaires to charting his spectacular implosion. Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is bankrupt and he is now appearing in a Manhattan federal court on multiple charges of fraud. In Going Infinite, the suspense is less rooted in whether or not he is guilty than whether Lewis will ever stop being so thoroughly charmed by him.
I should say here that I love Michael Lewis. As with all of his writing – with the exception of a toe-curling profile he did of President Obama for Vanity Fair 11 years ago – Going Infinite is insanely readable and I devoured it, marvelling at Lewis’s ability to pace, structure and humanise a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto. Two seconds after finishing I couldn’t have told you a single thing about how bitcoin actually works. It doesn’t matter. As with previous outings such as Moneyball (nerdy baseball stats), The Big Short (credit default swaps), and Flash Boys (high-frequency trading), Going Infinite shows off Lewis’s peculiar genius for making arcane information as transporting as fantasy fiction.
