Sam Bankman-Fried hates Shakespeare, his “unrealistic” characters and his obvious “denouements”. He is horrified by the idea that the English playwright could be considered the greatest writer in the world. Pure mathematical logic. In his time, “almost all Europeans were busy farming the land and very few people went to university […] Few could read and write, probably less than 10 million, compared to a billion people in the Western world today. What are the chances that the greatest writer was born in 1564?” he once blogged.
The anecdote is recorded by Michael Lewis in a book, Going Infinite, recently translated in France by Talent Editions. This obsession with numbers, probabilities and statistics sometimes turns irrational: “I have a 60% chance of going to Texas tomorrow,” he was able to say seriously to his assistant. But the character trait amuses the author a lot throughout the work. Because it has the merit of illuminating, in part, the ease of “SBF” in finance, an environment of which he will be the ephemeral darling.
Funny fish in a world of sharks
Michael Lewis shared with him the golden period of Bankman-Fried, between 2021 and the end of 2022. When “every celebrity wanted to be his friend, when everyone on Wall Street wanted to hear what he had to say”, says he told L’Express. Sam Bankman-Fried is then at the head of a cryptocurrency exchange platform called FTX. It is so successful that it is able to buy advertisements during the Superbowl halftime, or a splendid penthouse in the Bahamas for its teams. Sam, identifiable by his bushy, curly hair, dressed every day like a Sunday, fascinates. Faithful to “effective altruism”, a philosophy in vogue in a handful of American universities, SBF intends to maximize its profits in order to redistribute them in the health or education sector, and work for peace in the world. . He sleeps under his desk, drives a modest Toyota. Uncommon.
Going Infinite tracks down this strange fish in the world of financial sharks that Lewis knows perfectly well having explored its depths in Liars Poker, Flash Boys or even his best known, The Big Short, on the subprime crisis of 2008. The problem is that at one point, SBF itself becomes the shark. Its FTX platform collapses, eight billion dollars disappear. The start of trouble for him, and a little too, it must be said, for Michael Lewis.
The book, in its final chapters, relates the brutal fall of Bankman-Fried. But it does not take into account the trial which took place the days following its publication, in October 2023. It cannot therefore discuss the speed with which the jury found SBF guilty of all the charges of fraud and money laundering which it were blamed. Five hours, not one more, to expose the overwhelming evidence of his misdeeds, which Lewis had before his eyes during his immersion. “He looked more dishonest in the eyes of the jury than he ever seemed in mine,” the latter confesses today.
“FTX did not start as a gigantic criminal conspiracy”
This leniency towards SBF was widely commented on in the Anglo-Saxon press, which judged Lewis to be too close to his subject and criticized him for not raising a burning question: did Sam Bankman-Fried fool his world in order to develop a gigantic scam? This is what his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, herself involved in the fraud, said, ensuring that everything was false: her hair, her Toyota, her anti-materialism.
“FTX did not start as a gigantic criminal conspiracy,” Lewis remains convinced. According to him, American justice and public opinion do not take into account what he depicts in his work. The sociopathic profile of a boy whose birthday we didn’t celebrate when he was little. A carelessness regarding risks and an aversion to standards, to administration, to property which made what he did dangerous in his preferred environment. In short, negligence with oneself and with other people’s money. “I got to know him well. I interviewed hundreds of people, people who had been around him since he was four years old, who went to school with him, his best friends,” Lewis pleads, sure of his fact: “He was always constant in his personality.”
The author prefers to place the Bankman-Fried case in context. That of high-frequency trading companies, thirsty for young men like him, passionate about complex video games and capable of mastering dozens of parameters simultaneously in order to make a multi-million dollar decision. Then came cryptocurrencies, “in reaction to the excesses of finance at the end of the 2000s, but which then attracted a generation of traders plagued by boredom in traditional banks, much more controlled than before”, notes- he. Bankman-Fried’s disregard for risk and “effective altruism” will lead him there naturally. “If he had $100 billion and you offered him a good bet to win another $100 billion, he would have risked the original $100 billion,” says Michael Lewis. His problem is not that he wants to win more, like most fraudsters, but that he never imagines losing.
A life in prison
Ultimately, the author of Going Infinite finds the treatment of SBF unfair. “Many see him as a new Bernie Madoff [NDLR : le responsable d’une vaste arnaque à la pyramide de Ponzi, dans les années 2000]. The truth is more complex.” He denounces the charade surrounding the eight billion evaporated, “on the verge of being recovered in full” by the FTX fund recoverers. “I find it crazy that they are not seriously thinking about restarting the platform. It’s the most famous in history! And probably, from now on, the one that would be the most monitored.”
The limits of American justice also question him. Everyone close to Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX made pre-trial deals to reduce their prison sentences and loaded up on their former boss. “I spent a lot of time with them: there was no difference in their behavior. They all seemed as carefree as Sam,” says Lewis. “Do pre-trial agreements exist in France?” he asks, denouncing the contempt of these celebrities and politicians who accepted his money at the time, without in the least calling into question his good faith.
Lewis regularly speaks to Sam Bankman-Fried, who is incarcerated in a Brooklyn jail alongside “the former president of Honduras” and a “band of Mexican cartel killers.” “He is slowly going crazy,” he laments. “He is allowed a 15-minute phone call a day, to play ping-pong, to watch TV, but there is none. just one for everyone.” The author still enjoys the new life that SBF is building there. “It turns out that many prisoners have secret plans to become entrepreneurs. As for the prison guards, they secretly speculate on cryptocurrencies. They all talk to Sam. Ultimately, it’s as if he is in a position in the cell quite similar to that before the collapse: he is the center of attention.
However, the hardest part is yet to come. Found guilty, Sam Bankman-Fried does not yet know his sentence. “Maybe 20 years, or 50,” Lewis estimates. Or even an entire existence behind bars. The decision will be made during the month of March. It will open a new chapter in the history of SBF, which has become Shakespearean in spite of itself. A man from whom it is difficult to discern the good from the bad, a mixture of the comic and the tragic, catalyzing the morals and personalities of the time, from prominent elected officials to the stars of American football. His love for numbers remains. What worries Michael Lewis. “I fear that he will become suicidal after his conviction. Because he will make a calculation of the expected value of his life. And he will tell himself, perhaps, that it is no longer worth it.”
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