FWIW, I didn't find Lewis's book as bad (or amoral) as it's often made out to be. Yes, he didn't put his judgement in every paragraph, but his description of SBF was:

a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) he knew best and should basically ignore the advice of everyone else (particularly his elders), his naive utilitarianism without any deontological/virtue temperance, his reckless "many-worlds" risk-neutrality in gambling - that was all described in detail in the book, even if it was not explicitly condemned. Lewis didn't bother to show why these traits are bad. (I don't know what Lewis himself thought about them, but who cares? Show, don't tell.)

b) empathetic, eliciting compassion. Sure, the kid was screwed up, but here's why. And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god.

My conclusion: 1) Lewis's book was good and insightful, and it's unfair to describe it as an apologia. 2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil". 3) Let's have some damn humility.

I very much agree. "Number go up" by Faux is the better book in many respects, but Lewis's book contains much background info not reported elsewhere. Lewis's book is damning about SBF as you said. About how unapologetic and manipulative he is. About his willingness to gamble with other people's money. About his complete lack of ethical boundaries. About the casual way SBF ignored all laws he didn't like. About SBF's history of reckless gambling.

Yes, Lewis was (and probably still is) sympathetic to SBF. But that's also how he got him to talk! The book wouldn't have been possible had Lewis behaved as a skeptical investigative journalist. Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.

> Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.

Very nicely put.

Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset.

On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto.

Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.

Great recommendations! I've read all three of those books and they're terrific in different ways and all worth reading.

Everyone is a cocky MF until they get caught.

> About how unapologetic and manipulative he is. About his willingness to gamble with other people's money.

This describes most bankers? They’re generally smarter in that they work for an organization that dillutes responsibility for their crimes.

That's why most bankers are subject to all the laws that SBF didn't like.

Like Bernie Madoff?

Yeah that worked out great.

Madoff wasn't a banker.

Bernie Madoff did die in prison, so there’s that.

He died in prison. I don't know how much more subject to laws you can possibly get.

If you're aware of a financial crime, please report it to the SEC or one of the other financial regulators through their whistleblower hotline. You may be in for a big payday.

They are smart enough to make all their grifts "fees" and "interest rates"

For example, charging 17% on a credit card bill when the interest rate is 5.25%

and that's on excellent credit like mine where I haven't missed a payment in almost 20 years

There are important distinctions between fraud and greed. For one, you can know the conditions.

If you think the terms are unfair to you, you have the option to not do business with this particular bank. If all banks do the same, have you thought there's a financial reason behind it that you might not be aware of (say, default rate, operational costs, etc).

for people with credit over 800 the default rate must be extremely low

otherwise I wouldn't have this credit rating and the bank wouldn't trust me with over $100,000 credit limit combined over all of my credit cards

the reason I agree to this rate is because I never pay it, I loan from my broker instead where I pay like a few bips over LIBOR

> They are smart enough to make all their grifts "fees" and "interest rates"

> For example, charging 17% on a credit card bill when the interest rate is 5.25%

That's not fraud or a financial crime though, since the interest rate is prominently shown on the front page of every credit card bill.

If they're telling you it is 6% and then charge you 17% without explanation, that would be fraud.

For example, payday loans are explicit in saying they will charge you a percentage of your payday for a 14 day loan. But if you do the math, it's about 1000% interest annually

It's not a crime either, but it's predatory

Selling an expensive product or service is very different from committing fraud or stealing. There are plenty of practices within banking that are a lot more immoral than charging high fees.

I am aware of at least 2, I'm not in the U.S. , to disclose one crime I'd have to breach confidentiality and the most likely outcome would be that the bank would get a slap in the wrist or even nothing, meanwhile I'd be sued to oblivion and it would ruin my life (the same happens with some other crimes I know about, I once tried an anonymous tip about some grifting in the military and instead of taking it they said they went fully hostile and said they'd trace my call !!).

The other one I didn't have enough proof, apparently someone else did tip the authorities and the shady payday loan company is getting a slap in the wrist. Not exactly something to instill confidence in our justice (and my country is one of the least corrupt ones!)

The problem with Lewis's book is that it was pretty clear it was an on-a-dime pivot from the original story he had planned to tell, about a wunderkind revolutionizing finance and trying to save the world at the same time.

And Lewis was into the original plot less than this one. Lewis is clearly on board with the progressive inclination to say that their cause is more important than operating within traditional bounds on behavior. Lewis was on board with SBF's irresponsible approach to risk management and regulatory oversight, because unlike Wall Streeters taking excessive risk for personal gain, SBF doing it for the sake of "improving humanity" was just breaking an egg to make an omelette.

Yup, I'm really surprised by people defending Lewis. Don't get me wrong, I own most of his books but his 60 minutes interview about SBF was a cringe fest.

Yeah, I think those people just didn’t watch Lewis’ interviews on SBF.

Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things).

I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially.

[0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.

You're like reading my mind. Flash Boys made me question everything he ever wrote. I happen to know a great deal about HFT, and Lewis was like a proto-GPT, espousing with great confidence things that were easily verifiably false. It made me wonder if all his books were just as ill-informed and my ignorance of the subject kept me from realizing it.

Same. Also, in retrospect, The Blind Side was pretty problematic as well, and Lewis's handling of the recent Oher revelations was telling.

I have an MPA and I definitely found parts of The Fifth Risk cringy

Say more! I did read it, I don't remember much about it.

There's more of us it seems! I've been in HFT for the past 15 years and after reading Flash Boys I had to do a full 180 on Lewis. Every single book from him I now treat as mainly fiction sprinkled with some historical facts to maybe make it more relatable.

I don't even think it requires knowledge of HFT to see the flaw in the whole thing.

For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."

_Flash Boys: Not So Fast_ is such a complete take down of _Flash Boys_ it's embarrassing and calls into question each of his works.

It's also a good read all on its own.

Oh, I have not heard of it before, will have to check it out. Thanks!

Where is the omelette?

SBF also ate the omelette

Even if FTX had never collapsed, I would still be shocked that Lewis didn't get proof of the management team's charitable donations. Through the whole book, Lewis keeps saying that all the profits were getting rolled into charity. Then in the trial, it came Singh testified that he hadn't actually been giving away money; it is unclear if other folks were doing the same thing.

To be fair, that’s probably what anyone would have seen from the ground level and I think what I liked about it.

> kid

He's a 32 year old man.

No no, he is rich so of course he is just a kid, lost in the sauce, accidentally squandering a few billion. Now, 16 year old male from a low income household, those are men, and should know the consequence of their actions better. /s

This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.

It's not really propaganda, I think it popped up mostly because typical finance leaders are seen as being on the older side. As a Patrick Boyle video on the issue had put it, they had barely been in finance long enough to be trusted with the morning coffee run.

"Kid" is meant to be derogatory, highlighting the absurdity of traditional investors trusting openly irresponsible people with such little experience in such a heavily experience and regulation dependent field like finance. They behaved like spoiled children, with all the drugs and sex going around within the company, gaming while talking to investors etc. It doesn't make SBF look better.

Madoff was in his 60s.

And people probably weren't calling him a kid.

Why is playing a video game worse than a "3 martini lunch" or flying Tom Epstein Island? Finance is bad boys top to bottom, of all ages.

Finance is about money, that's going to attract some people that are motivated purely by money. That's a bad thing and the culture in any institution should discourage this.

Yet at the same time finance is a big industry, there's plenty of honest, hardworking people that do their 9 to 5 (or more realistically 8 to 7) and go home to their kids. Finance has bad apples (just like tech) but I don't think we should write off the entire industry for that.

I'm learning his age in this thread and pretty surprised. I would have pegged him as being in his late twenties. I think stuff like his haircut, his general attitude, the league of legends thing, all contribute to making him seem younger than he his.

Late twenties and 32 are 3 year difference. I don't see a meaningful difference between those two ages.

There's not many years difference between "late 20s" and 32. 3 years, if we set our benchmark at 29. As someone in their early 30s themself, do I consider myself much more mature or experienced than I was a few years ago? Not really; my life is in a better place, but that's because of factors that are kind of orthogonal to maturity.

Wealth is well known for extending childhood, sometimes until death.

Propaganda or hired PR team influencing the discourse?

He dresses like a teenager

So do most of my peers, and I'm 40.

A few of us wear suit jackets now, but I think that's just to stand out from the crowds of jeans and t-shirts that became my generation's accidental dress code.

(Though perhaps I'm just projecting; on the rare occasions I wear a suit jacket, that's what I'm thinking).

oh it was no accident. it took a lot of determined laziness and disregard for the casual Friday corporate culture BS by smarter than most people to change to rules.. band shirts, cargo shorts and skate shoes beats button downs, khakis, and leather loafers all day err day. got a not so casual work event to attend? bust out the nice grateful dead shirt, black zip up hoodie, and the jeans without the holes, and own it hard

I’m mostly with you but

1) blazers, specifically, are awesome, they’re wearable purses that also make you look sharper. They’re a superior version of the open button-up shirt I’d wear in high school because it was trendy back then and which also had (less well-realized) utility and useful-in-a-pinch value, and

2) loafers are the best shoe for everyday not-very-active stuff, and it’s not a close call. Slip on! It’s insane that they’re considered even a little dressy. A small miracle.

Except if you're an active person. Blazers don't give you full range of arm motion unless they are laughable baggy or made of some weird stretch material that looks cheap. Loafers are sub-optimal for running up stairs, catching the train/bus that's about to leave, or moving heavy things.

Or if someone has set the HVAC for a temperature above 60F.

Action back. (Yes that’s the actual name)

Look at Indy’s suit early in Crusaders for an example.

I don't care about age, 50+, blue jeans, black tshirt, sometimes with a Mario print, hoodie when it's colder. I dropped the pink chucks though.

Blue jeans? Please give slacks a look... :P

I think your criticism is unfair. I didn't know how biological age, and I thought he was probably in his early-mid 20s. Not because he's rich and white, but because he acts, dresses, and cuts his hair like an emotionally immature boy genius right out of college.

He cultivated the "Zuck look" intentionally because he was tricking people like you who believed in it.

It’s the label ‘man’ something you give to someone that is grown up?

Friedman is many things, but ‘grown up’ is not something that I think applies.

He's a full grown adult, who was trusted with billions of dollars, and worked with other full grown adults, who aided in his crimes.

Calling him a kid implies that he wasn't fully in control of his actions and shouldn't be held accountable to the same level as an adult would, and that's ridiculous.

> He's a full grown adult, who was trusted with billions of dollars, and worked with other full grown adults, who aided in his crimes.

Yes, but I think this reflects more on the people that trusted him/them.

The whole crypto world is one gigantic ponzi scheme. Stealing the money is only worse because it can be proven.

Exactly...

> The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-o...

Well before the downfall they also referred to him as a wunderkind.

I think I read that Lewis was almost finished with the book, which was about to come out, and which was highly pro-SBF, when the FTX scandal Broke? So he then had to quickly revise and "save" the book by changing the tone in view of the FTX scandal? If so, it's probably an unusual book in view of the last hour rewrites.

That doesn't seem to be the case at all. A lot of the sympathetic content occurs _after_ the scandal and arrest, and Lewis has continued to take the same tone in interviews. Further, an inordinate amount of time is dedicated earlier in the book to a problem at Alameda that Lewis draws parallels to the scandal that took him down, clearly working toward his thesis. Lewis is one of the most-read living authors: they could have gotten a crack team of editors to help him revise the book in no time if he wanted to. It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. It's not even an implausible view.

If you are talking about the time Alameda lost track of a bunch of money, and everyone freaks out except SBF, who turns out to be right, that story was hilarious foreshadowing.

Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much.

He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent".

One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy.

A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.

this exactly. the freakonomics podcast (iirc, maybe the economist's money talks?) did a long form interview with the "emergency CEO" that was parachuted in when ftz filed for bankruptcy.

my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys.

ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam.

it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money".

tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.

The famous John Ray (emergency CEO) quote from a court filing was

> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.

which seems likely to be an understatement.

And John Ray had previously served as the chairman of Enron after its bankruptcy, so he might know a thing or two about dysfunctional accounting. :)

>the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it.

This is explicitly not the case. The new management has not found hundreds of millions (billions) in cryptocurrency assets. Some other assets have surged in value and that may allow FTX to make some customers "whole" (meaning, they will not lose much money in an environment where otherwise maybe they would have strongly profited), but this isn't the same thing.

The new management found many billions of assets of various asset classes https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-... When FTX thought it was broke, there were really billions of dollars of stuff they were too much of a mess to come up with.

That isn't to say that 'all the money was there' or that the conduct wasn't deeply criminal and unethical, but a huge part of the shortfall was really just terrible books.

If true, kind of funny. If they weren't so incompetent they may've been able to skate past it without the public realizing what was going on.

When you’re talking about 8 billion dollars, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that “a huge part of the shortfall was found” means that billions of dollars weren’t.

The claim seemed to me to be that very little money was found compared to the 8 billion dollars. That doesn't seem true.

One concrete claim I found is that many BTC holders might get paid back in USD at the then-price of the coin, which is ~$16K. Bitcoin is currently at ~$65K, which indicates that they could have lost up to 75% of the underlying coins. Just to be clear: this is not the same as being made whole.

That billions of stuff were other coins that dropped in value which they were using to run their scheme and investments that are still illiquid, like their 500 million dollar investment in Anthropic. I can only imagine what that Anthropic investment is worth today.

https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/7ab64a3b-6c...

This is even from the article you reference: "FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal."

You have a source indicating the $473 to $600+ million that was supposedly moved to cold storage from client wallets was all recovered by the law, and/or the new stewards of FTX?

>the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored.

To be clear, they also gambled with normal FTX customer funds. People who were just buying cryptocurrency through ordinary means and not trying to do sophisticated trading. It was simple theft. You can say they thought they'd make the money back plus some, but I think a lot of Ponzi scheme heads think the exact same way.

> the money ended up all being there,

Someone associated with the case said that just because it was possible to recover most of the money he stole doesn't mean he didn't steal it. Crooks routinely go to jail even when the cops recover the money or goods.

Well also they made a percentage on any money coming in and out of FTX. That gave them a buffer of profit, a free money machine basically.

That could paper over any problems until the problems became big enough to sink them.

He also made and then lost a crazy amount of money at Jane Street during election night before he started all this. He was a gambler.

> SBF was just not very detail oriented ... and sure the rules didn't matter much.

anybody well versed with human personalities will know those 2 things overlap and might as well be the same thing (details and rules). Thats who SBF is by nature. And he created a company with similar culture. Thats's a recipe for disaster. That's where his lack of emotional intelligence shows up. not realizing the absolutely necessary need for the other opposite of his personality (people who need details and follow rules diligently). SBF was always going to end up where he ended unless he had found ways to make up for his lack of details and disdain for rules. Yes it helps him take risks others wouldn't take, make money quicker than others couuld, but it also came with the risks of losing money faster than others and ending up way afoul of the society. As someone with a similar personality style (fast rough estimate calculator with little regards for deails and rules), I have no sympathy for him. He lacks the most important dimension of intelligence - emotional intelligence. His arrogance in his own intelligence wouldn't even let him see that he did.

> It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind.

He was a dumbass though. He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know...

This guy was lying like crazy in the media. He even said it was a ponzi scheme. Maybe he's a dumbass but he's also a criminal who was committing crimes while out there doing PR the whole time. Even during his trial he was lying so let's not act like he was in over his head and made some mistakes. He's never even owned up to it.

> He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know..

This denies him agency. Probably a better hypothesis is that he was a raging narcissist who thought he could swindle everyone with none the wiser, without realizing how transparent his fraud was.

It seems like for your theory to be better, it should fit the facts better (not saying it doesn't). Whether it seems agentic or not doesn't seem very relevant to whether it's what happened.

Lewis also soft-sells the polyamorous relationships and complications that caused around SBF's relationship with Caroline Ellison. Caroline wants to go public, and why that would be a much bigger deal in the polyamorous world they were living in.

It's similar in many of Lewis's other analysis of SBF's relationships. Lewis avoids context that makes SBF look much worse.

What does "going public" mean in this context?

Announcing to everyone around them that they were in a relationship.

I'm not familiar with the book but this doesn't sound like it pattern matches with any of the poly I've experienced. Going public is a big deal in poly in particular? Since when? What kind of self respecting tech bro group house doesn't have a graph of all the poly on their whiteboard?

Gross

If it wasn't a big deal, SBF would have been OK with Ellison going public with it. But he wasn't, and held out against it. Lewis spends not a single word digging into SBF's motivations around that.

Worse, he spends barely a chapter on how the polyamory which pervaded the highest levels of both Alameda and FTX might have clouded everyone's judgement and ability to say no. Mostly just limiting himself to: "It was a bunch of young adults all living together and who slept with whom changed rather fluidly. It wasn't a sex or orgy den, and the lurid tales about sex parties and all that aren't accurate."

Which I guess is probably true as far as it goes.

But not spending any time at all about how those relationships may have affected the corporate governance shows a strange lack of curiosity and unwillingness to think about conflicts of interest any relationship between business partners creates.

[I have no problem with polyamory itself--as long as everyone is consenting it's not really any of my business.]

I love salacious details like everyone else, but it sounds like you're looking for data where none exists. Why would those relationships affect the company, and who is going to consent to an interview about it? What exactly are you expecting Lewis to do?

The problem as I see it is not polyamory, it is casual sexual relationships between coworkers. It is kind of like why officers are not supposed to have relationships with their subordinates -- it subverts the authority that must exist in a structure where people are held accountable for decisions. By adding polyamory into the mixed it just made it worse since it increased the incidents exponentially.

Sure, that's what they tell you in MBA school... but the real world of starting up new businesses is not so simple. Let's take YC for example:

https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

YC is a success, PG/JL's relationship survived, and nobody got indicted. They're role models. If YC failed or PG got divorced, people might view it differently.

I guess what I'm saying is... I wouldn't read too much into SBF's sex life, and I wouldn't berate Lewis for not prying, especially with uncooperative subjects.

FTX had a 32--billion dollar valuation by that point, with over one-million users. Alameda was well over one billion and doing very sophisticated financial transactions.

That's not a tiny little startup hoping to make it big. Your investors and board want you to follow proper corporate governance, especially around conflicts of interest. Your users would like you to follow proper corporate governance rules so they don't lose their money. And do little things like following the express rules you told them you would follow (like FTX not loaning customer deposits to Alameda).

Playing fast and loose with the rules is what got him into trouble. The fact that Lewis doesn't pursue this angle just shows how big the pass Lewis gave him. It didn't have to be all about the lurid details, but the lack of best practices here was pretty bad.

By what point? The SBF/Ellison relationship predated FTX by years.

SBF lost+stole billions and you are angry with Lewis because he didn't pry into the guy's sex life? Which might not even be all that interesting, we're just assuming it. I like a good tabloid story too but come on.

I’m not angry about his sex life as such. Good grief. If it was exactly the same only with a bunch of people he didn’t employ and wasn’t committing fraud with I wouldn’t care at all.

Romantic relationships within a business, especially within the executive suite, cause conflicts of interest. Webs of romantic relationships create webs of conflicts of interest. If the executive suite commits a multi billion dollar fraud, not inquiring into what role the conflicts of interest played in that fraud ignores an important piece of the story.

The conflicts of interest almost certainly made the financial crimes much worse in the form of less oversight and less ability to look at what and was doing objectively.

Partners being partners feels different from the whole company being a free-for-all.

Small beans compared to stealing billions of dollars. It's astonishing how the actual crime that SBF committed is almost invisible in much of this discussion.

What does an IPO (or ICO?) have to to with “polyamorous world?”

No, parent means "going public [about their polyamorous relationship]".

A good biography does not cast too many moral aspersions. Its job is to paint a portrait of the person's life, including the details and quirks that shed insight into the subject's character. If you want affirmations of the awfulness of SBF and his crimes, there is no shortage of that by media and pundits.

> btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances

Which is where it’s bullshit arising out of the incentives of access journalism.

The Heinlen quote is more meaningful: you won’t be Sam. (If you’re in the set of people who could be Sam, the conversation is different.) But you might fall into his orbit.

What is your definition of 'evil' if not self-serving, lacking in empathy for others, and amoral?

Would he have to torture puppies for fun to check all the boxes? Because if so, Hitler loved dogs.

Maybe "evil" is a word for fiction stories only. In SBF's case, maybe "narcissist" is better (includes the properties you listed, and can like dogs)

Banality of evil. I'm sure SBF seems like a decent person who just wants to run a cool business and play with technology. He never thought he was a crook.

I don't think the banality of evil applies here. Banality of evil is when cogs in a bureaucratic machine don't think about how their actions hurt others, because they are just processing paperwork or following standard operating procedure. Regular people doing regular people things can do great evil.

In this case SBF was the architect and the driving force behind the fraud. He decided to comingle customers funds with business funds. He decided to trick banks into processing client money. He decided to split FTX into dozens of shell corporations to make effective oversight impossible. He decided to operate from Hong Kong and the Bahama's.

Banality of evil might apply to a junior engineer at FTX. It doesn't apply to SBF who masterminded the whole criminal enterprise.

The phrase was coined in reference to Adolf Eichmann.

Yes, but it was coined to promote specific view of Eichmann that he himself tried to cast himself in: that he didn't really like murdering Jews, he was just following orders.

I think your usage/quote was bold but appropriate.

Yes, and "banality of evil" is famously misunderstood:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-10-12/ty-article/th...

(Eichmann was a Nazi through and through, fiercely antisemitic, knew exactly what was going on, and liked it. He didn't just "go along with it" in the banal sense, he chose evil knowingly.)

I never understood it that way. It was just that Eichmann and many other prominent monsters of the Nazi era were polite, cordial and unassuming people when you got them alone. That you could never tell what hideous souls they had because they didn't put it on display. They weren't cackling madmen or vicious savages in their personal lives.

I think that interpretation conflates civility politics and banality of evil.

One axis about decorum and appearance. Those who look and act like "good and decent upper middle class people" always get the benefit of the doubt where others do not, even when that appearance, like with Eichmann, completely falls apart on closer inspection.

The other axis distinguishes between people who have a highly ideological agenda and execute on it (evil) and those who are mostly unthinking cogs in a machine of destruction (banal evil).

#2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle.

All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.

Not for nuttin' but that sounds like Aspergers. Mind you, I'm not a trained professional (to make that diagnosis). It's also no excuse.

That said, it makes a case for being aware of your blindspots (read: weaknesses). And if you think you have none... Well that's a blind spot. Fucking deal with it.

So much of the apologia for SBF is disgusting. I don't need to have any humility, because I don't steal from people. I don't throw colleagues and lovers under the bus when I get caught stealing. I have humility and don't believe I'm the savior of crypto, the unbanked, etc etc. His entire worldview reeks of hubris and narcissism on a level I find disgusting and so common in "bro" culture. The idea that he can get out in 25 years makes me sad with our justice system.

Absolutely. White-collar crime destroys lives.

Since the type of financial situation and financier Lewis writes about typically is amoral but also is sure that they are correct and proper, Lewis' continued access to future SBFs requires that he offload judgement to the reader.

It's almost like a realtime version of "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" or "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly".

Thank you very much for using 'deontological'. I learned a very useful word today

A recent HN thread led me to this article of his which I found delightful: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/jonathan-lebed-s...

Im a big Michael Lewis fan and my only major gripe with that book is that he released it when the trial began, which meant he had to finish it well before. He left out the ending.

It’s an interesting story but it’s basically a cliffhanger with no sequel. He cut out right at the point where we learn the gritty details.

> a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid)

Wow, I can’t fathom how one could believe everyone else is stupid. Yeah, SBF went to MIT, but really the best students in each descent university likely fall into the same percentile of academic talent. Or, as Bezos used to say, people can be smart in a thousand ways.

>And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god.

that criteria is applicable to literally any criminal, ever. It's effectively useless as a statement about crime and punishment, although it serves as a useful reminder to those not condemned.

>2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil".

moral standpoint doesn't put you in shackles, poor judgement when comparing your morality with that of society is what does that.

finance is one of the most amoral industries to ever exist. They sit next to weapons and land-mine manufacturers, as far as i'm concerned.

Amorality is a benefit to the financier, the trick is finding someone that is amorale while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution.

SBFs morality doesn't matter -- what broke him was his poor judgement and overzealous confidence. We're not condemning him for his morality, that just speaks better to the court; he's in trouble because his plans backfired and money was lost for important people.

(p.s. we don't imprison people for being 'amorale', whatever that might mean from whoever is saying it.)

> the trick is finding someone that is amoral while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution.

Uber and WeWork come to mind.

>Not true for the people in his orbit

You mean the other people at FTX or Alameda who knew it was a scam?

No dog in this race either way, but what is Michael Lewis meant to have done? Is it just that people feel hist treatment of SBF in Going Infinite was too lenient?

Many people feel he whitewashed him and continued to defend him and minimize his misconduct long after his arrest.

Exactly.

> An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover.

Enough SBF talk. Let’s hear some cousin stories!

> I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit; I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done.

Lol they're all very well off. Why tf are you worried about them, of all people in the world?

put another way, you're engaged in sexual, financial, and managerial relationships with an epic fraudster, and continue that pattern well after it's become clear that they're, at best, kind of dubious.

most people will never be anywhere near that, not on that scale and scope, and not with that kind of insight.

They are not mistakes, they are crimes. Anyone who worked in finance for more than a week can recognise their actions as such.

You think a 25 year sentence is impossible to recover from? I think he can still leave a meaningful life coming out in his mid 50s.

I highly doubt he will serve all 25. There is no parole in a fed case, but could get reduced time for good behavior. Unlikely he will be in prison stabbing people.

Good behaviour in federal sentences is restricted to 15% off the total.

So almost 4 years

There is also First Step Act.

Highly unlikely after spending most of his adult life in federal prison.

Imagine going into prison in the late 90's and coming out all the technology in the world today, none of which you've seen except maybe on TV.

The Dick Tracey movie came out in 1990 and now we've got smart watches which are literally a cell phone on your wrist.

Imagine going into jail when AIM/MSN/ICQ were the hotness and coming out to tiktok and snapchat.

That's someone who went into jail in the 90's. Imagine someone who went into jail in the early 80's or 70's. Coming out to the modern world would be like time traveling.

A lot of inmates coming out of multi-decade imprisonment are completely overwhelmed by how far society has advanced.

Pfft, in what ways has society advanced since then?

I'm being a bit facetious, but lets be real, most of the interactions people have with technological advancement create negative value for themselves and everyone around them.

The only thing that's arguably neutral is basic chat, and maybe HN which is marginally more sophisticated than it would have been then. Being able to take high quality photo and video at any time is quite a lot more commodified, but I feel like a former prisoner could handle that.

Maybe video calls would do it, that's another big one, but people born in the 30s can deal with it.

News reports say that he might serve as little as 12.5 years.

No, I think Sam is too far into his own demented world to rejoin ours in a productive way. Hope I’m wrong.

I don't think Caroline is a bad person. She was brilliant smart and focused on academics etc. She got pulled into this mess during the crypto mania phase.

She willingly conjured up fake financial documents to suit Sam's needs. She had the kind of credentials that would have easily landed her a job at other financial institutions, she absolutely could have quit at any point.

I think you mean to say, "An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly get away with it."

Sorry but he didn't "screw things up" he knew (objectively) early on that it was a cascade. And so he did the first mistake, load from a sister company, using self assets. When it wasn't called out, of course you think "this must be okay".

He's cheeky and a chancer. He is a victim of your uncles idiom. But that's not the crime, the crime is getting there.

I got a laugh from the author's assertion that the Lewis book examines "the psychology of an impulsive, chaotic, misanthropic genius". I mean, "genius" has long been a ludicrously overused word, but even so, this is a new low.

Isaac Newton is an example of an actual genius, someone whose work changed the world. Sam Bankman-Fried is an epically hubristic confidence man who stole/lost eight billion dollars and will as a consequence be spending a long time in jail.

>We could easily make the same mistakes they do.

Could we really all watch a friend spend hundreds of millions of dollars, getting into a questionable business, and not ask a single question about what’s going on?

Because I’m really, really confident I would never find myself in that situation.

It’s like comparing helping a serial killer bury 25 bodies to being a wingman to your buddy in a bar and backing him up when he claims to be 6’ when you know he’s really 5’10”.

Only one of these situations I can picture myself in.

> I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done.

After they do their time, of course.

> I think that's true for Sam. I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit

People in his orbit knew very well what they were doing and looks that they will get mostly slapped on their wrists, since most fault was attributed to SBF only.

> An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover.

beyond me why this irrelevant uncle comment is at the top but let me tell you this ... you can always recover. the only thing you don't recover from is death.

What are you talking about? 25 years is absolutely nothing! You think he will not recover? I bet you he’ll be an influencer or something like that once he is out after 15 years (because USA is corrupt as hell).

"I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done."

How exactly would they do this? Have you read the victim impact statements?

Mistakes are errors. Like typing "Rick Heicklen" instead of "Ricki Heicklen".

But intentionally breaking the law in order to profit, is that a "mistake"?

A error in judgment perhaps.

SBF claimed he made "mistakes" but he never admitted guilt and he never apologised for breaking the law. He perjured himself while expecting the audience to believe he was "brilliant", competent and trustworthy to handle other peoples' money.

If what Heicklen calls "smart people" can work for a company with no organizational chart, no board of directors, no CFO, no need to use more than QuickBooks for handling millions of dollars in customer deposits, then perhaps these people are not "smart".

And it would be a "mistake" to believe otherwise. (Heicklen may still be disillusioned.)

We are living in a time when it is not safe to assume that because there is large amounts of money behind something that this something is in fact legitimate.

These people named in the comment all come from privileged backgrounds. Many of the victims of the FTX collapse, the ones who wrote to Judge Kaplan before the trial and the ones who submitted impact statements before sentencing, do not. Call me cynical but I do not forsee any of those named in Heicklen's blog post going to work to serve (cf. exploit) people from non-privileged backgrounds.

Did they report the crimes? No.