Six months before the late 2022 collapse of his cryptocurrency empire, Sam Bankman-Fried signed the Giving Pledge. As is customary, Bankman-Fried wrote a letter explaining why he was joining the more than 200 major philanthropists committed to giving away at least half of their fortunes. It was brief, offering only that he had felt a “duty to do the most we could for the long run aggregate utility of the world.”
If that’s a skimpy view into the mind of the crypto mogul as philanthropist, the just-released Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon puts more meat on the bones. The book tells the story of how Bankman-Fried, the math-savant son of Stanford law professors, built Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund, and then FTX, a crypto-trading exchange, and became one of the wealthiest people in the world before he turned 30. Today, of course, federal prosecutors allege that Alameda took FTX customer assets to fund its trades. Bankman-Fried’s trial on 13 criminal charges, including fraud, begins this week.
Going Infinite — the work of Michael Lewis, author of Wall Street-based best-sellers Liar’s Poker and The Big Short — offers entertaining glimpses into his subject’s philanthropy. There’s a fly-on-the-wall view of Bankman-Fried playing a video game while being courted on Zoom by Vogue editor Anna Wintour to attend — and pay for — the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Gala. Lewis also reconstructs the awakening of Bankman-Fried’s social conscience as a boy, and he details Bankman-Fried’s recruitment into the effective-altruism movement, whose followers work to earn the most money so that they can give to causes that do the most good.
What emerges in Lewis’s book is a portrait of a billionaire philanthropist who, in both personality and motivations for giving, is like few, if any, of his Giving Pledge peers. (He was removed from the online list of Giving Pledge members after his arrest.) “He felt nothing in the presence of art,” Lewis writes. “He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity.”
Lewis also offers a skeptical and unflattering picture of effective altruism, or EA, in action — or perhaps in extreme. Bankman-Fried’s commitment to EA was such that he hired only fellow EA adherents when he started Alameda. That’s akin to Michael Bloomberg, at the start of his media empire, staffing up only with people who shared his goals for gun control and urban revitalization.
Empathy and other human feelings that inspire philanthropy “didn’t matter” to Bankman-Fried and his colleagues, according to Lewis. “What mattered was math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life.”
‘A Vessel to Save Lives’
Here are a few other takeaways from Lewis’s reporting.
Bankman-Fried was a pioneering practitioner of effective altruism. A group of young Oxford University philosophers formally launched the EA movement in 2011. A year later, one of them, Will MacAskill, recruited Bankman-Fried, then a junior physics major at MIT. MacAskill pitched him on the idea that he should make as much money as possible to save the most lives — an “argument that struck Sam as simply right,” Lewis writes. He bought in instantly.
Since childhood, Bankman-Fried had embraced a utilitarian view of the world espoused by his parents. His life had to have purpose, he decided, and he needed to do what he could to alleviate suffering. “It felt unambitious to not care about what happened to the rest of the world,” he told Lewis. “It was shooting too low to only think about what was going to impact me.”
MacAskill told Lewis that three of four people who sought him out on college EA recruiting efforts were young men with a background in math or science. “The demographics of who this appeals to are the demographics of a physics Ph.D. program,” MacAskill said. “The levels of autism 10 times the average. Lots of people on the spectrum.”
Effective altruism drove his career choices and business decisions. After college, Bankman-Fried took a job as a Wall Street trader at Jane Street Capital, where an early EA adherent, Matt Wage, worked. Bankman-Fried left several years later, in 2017, when he concluded that his compensation — likely to reach as much as $75 million a year — wasn’t the most he could earn. He could save more lives if he made more money, he concluded, and thus began his venture into cryptocurrency, where he estimated he could reel in $1 million a day.
When he launched Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried saw it as “a vessel to save some vast number of lives,” according to Lewis. His sole investors at the start were fellow EA adherents. Also, his first hires were all effective altruists: Because cryptocurrency is digital cash that’s easy to steal, he needed to trust his employees, Lewis writes. “Wall Street firms were not capable of generating that level of trust, but EA was.”
After FTX was thriving and Bankman-Fried became a billionaire, he entertained the idea of joining Elon Musk in the purchase of Twitter, partly because Musk has shown an affinity for effective altruism. (He ultimately did not.)
“In Sam’s mind, his money wasn’t crypto money,” Lewis writes. “It was effective-altruist money that he happened to obtain through crypto.”
The EA adherents working with Bankman-Fried were extremely committed to the idea. They all said they cared about “humanity,” Lewis writes, yet often were slow to love actual people. Among his sources: psychiatrist George Lerner, whom many Alameda and FTX employees saw for care and who later became an FTX employee.
“It doesn’t really start with people,” Lerner told Lewis. “It starts with suffering. It’s about preventing suffering. They care about animals in the same way. They also care about not having the earth blown up by an asteroid. But it’s not a longing for a connection.”
Alameda Research offers plenty of fodder for EA critics. Lewis notes several inconsistencies in the EA approach. Summing up the concerns of Nishad Singh, one of the firm’s leaders, he writes:
“Basically all of Alameda Research’s employees and investors were committed to giving all their money away to roughly the same charitable causes. You might surmise that they wouldn’t much care who wound up with the money, as it all would go to saving the lives of the same people none of them would ever meet. You would be wrong: In their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs.”
Singh told Lewis that the early investors were charging an interest rate of 50 percent. “It wasn’t a normal loan,” he said. “It was a shark loan.”
Bankman-Fried saw both politics and philanthropy as levers to changing the world as he saw fit. “It just seems like there isn’t enough money in politics,” he told Lewis. “People are underdoing it. The weird thing is that Warren Buffett isn’t giving $2 billion a year.”
While the mogul’s giving for pandemic prevention is widely known, Lewis reports that Bankman-Fried wanted to funnel $15 to $30 million to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to back anti-Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 GOP primaries.
“Trump’s assault on the government, and on the integrity of U.S. elections, belonged, to Sam’s way of thinking, on the same list as pandemics and artificial intelligence and climate change,” Lewis writes.
Before FTX was shuttered, its philanthropy was focused on the long term, not short-term suffering. Lewis makes clear that Bankman-Fried and his colleagues had embraced “longtermism,” the idea that effective altruists should prioritize giving toward a better future rather than responding to today’s problems. Toward the end of the book, Lewis describes a 2022 gathering of Bankman-Fried’s top lieutenants — all effective altruists — to determine FTX’s philanthropic priorities for what was going to be $300 million in giving that year and as much as $1 billion in 2023. For two nights, they met in a penthouse condo near the company’s Bahamas headquarters and considered existential threats to humanity posed by future pandemics and artificial intelligence. They had long ago concluded that “conventional philanthropy was dumb,” Lewis writes, and now wanted to “do their bit to save the species.”
Weeks later, Bankman-Friend was arrested on fraud charges, colleagues were preparing to testify against him, and FTX had declared bankruptcy.
