Boy wonder Sam Bankman-Fried plundered billions of dollars of customer money from his crypto exchange—an act that has brought him to a New York courtroom, where he is now on trial for fraud. In anticipation of the spectacle, the publishing industry has rushed out a series of titles, including Number Go Up (Crown Publishing) and Easy Money (Harry N. Abrams), that shed light on the FTX founder and his role in the crypto madness that swept the world before it came crashing down in late 2022.
Now comes Michael Lewis, the big dog of business journalism, to weigh in on the subject with Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (W.W. Norton & Co.). Unlike the other authors, Lewis enjoyed hundreds of hours of access to Bankman-Fried, viewing firsthand his out-of-nowhere ascent up until the miserable final hours preceding his arrest in the Bahamas last November. This access combined with Lewis's masterful storytelling powers put him in position to write the best and most authoritative book of the bunch. Unfortunately, Going Infinite is not that book. Lewis has instead put out a maddening and distorted work that threatens to undercut his towering literary reputation.
