Reactions: Going Infinite, Michael Lewis
I read the book over the course of a week or so. It’s only 250 pages. No filler. Appreciated that.
SBF is such a weird dude. I didn’t know a ton about him before reading the book, but now I feel like I thought of him as too normal. The descriptions of his “inability to feel pleasure,” treating everything as an expected value calculation, and a total lack of empathy makes it somewhat unsurprising he got busted for fraud.
Businesses in the financial industry are complicated. I don’t understand them very well beyond the surface level. I’d like to learn more generally about exchanges and financial markets. That complexity helped to hide the problems inside FTX.
I’m astonished at how something so well-known and popular, with backing from significant and smart investors, media coverage galore, and major public involvement was able to operate for so long. Also astonished at the $$ figures that were being thrown around by SBF and FTX.
The FTX story could only happen in the weird Wild West environment that crypto was/is. A totally novel concept at the intersection of finance and technology (it moves really quickly + there’s money to be made) leaves everyone—literally everyone from regulators to industry people to celebrities to the Average Joes—unclear about what’s really going on with this stuff, but also willing to let it play out.
Michael Lewis should write an Epilogue or some kind of postmortem now that SBF went to trial + all the info that came out and so many of his people testified against him + he’s been put in the slammer until 2044.