In this extraordinary book, the author of The Big Short digs into the roots of the ideological fantasy land created by the cryptocurrency billionaire now on trial in the US
hen I first read about the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the arrest last December of its then 30-year-old billionaire CEO and co-founder, my immediate thought was: “Well, there’s a story for Michael Lewis.
At one point, Bankman-Fried floated the idea of simply paying Donald Trump to give up on politics. Surely there was a number that could persuade him to do so? For all the futuristic scope of this tale, there was, inevitably, a much older kind of tragicomedy also at play. Bankman-Fried’s downfall could be partly traced to a secretive affair with a young woman called Caroline Ellison, the CEO of the investment wing of his empire – Alameda Research. It is alleged he used billions of dollars from FTX to repay loans owed by Alameda.
Bankman-Fried, the son of a pair of Stanford law professors, was equipped to exploit those “meta games”. On leaving MIT, he quickly established himself as a player in the niche world of high-frequency automated trading; when those markets frustrated him, he established his own. He recruited a coding genius called Gary Wang to build an algorithm to exploit the wrinkles in crypto’s imperfect markets. Quickly, that program was bringing in millions of dollars a day.
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