AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 • One of Pure Wow's 42 Book to Gift This Year • One of Fortune's Best Crypto Books of 2023
"Going Infinite is in many ways Lewis at his best. He marshals a complex global story without losing sight of the delightful and revealing human details. He is a world-class noticer."—Jesse Armstrong, writer and creator of HBO's Succession, Times Literary Supplement
"A stupefyingly pleasurable book to read." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker
"Going Infinite is an instant classic." — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic
"Going Infinite is wildly entertaining, surprising multiple times on pretty much every page, but it adds up to a sad story, even a tragedy, for its central character and for all the people who lost so much thanks to his actions." —John Lanchester, London Review of Books
"Will join Digital Gold as one of the all-time best crypto books."—Jeff John Roberts, Fortune
"A wry, engaging writer and a gifted storyteller." —Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times
"It may be easy to take for granted how entertainingly [Michael Lewis] pulls it off again in Going Infinite." —Brett Martin, GQ
From the best-selling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the story of FTX's spectacular collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center.
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 • One of Pure Wow's 42 Book to Gift This Year • One of Fortune's Best Crypto Books of 2023
"Going Infinite is in many ways Lewis at his best. He marshals a complex global story without losing sight of the delightful and revealing human details. He is a world-class noticer."—Jesse Armstrong, writer and creator of HBO's Succession, Times Literary Supplement
"A stupefyingly pleasurable book to read." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker
"Going Infinite is an instant classic." — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic
"Going Infinite is wildly entertaining, surprising multiple times on pretty much every page, but it adds up to a sad story, even a tragedy, for its central character and for all the people who lost so much thanks to his actions." —John Lanchester, London Review of Books
"Will join Digital Gold as one of the all-time best crypto books."—Jeff John Roberts, Fortune
"A wry, engaging writer and a gifted storyteller." —Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times
"It may be easy to take for granted how entertainingly [Michael Lewis] pulls it off again in Going Infinite." —Brett Martin, GQ
From the best-selling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the story of FTX's spectacular collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center.
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.
Critiques-
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October 23, 2023
The spectacular collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its eccentric billionaire founder Sam Bankman-Fried is sifted in this rollicking investigation. Bestseller Lewis (The Big Short) casts Bankman-Fried as a stranger-than-fiction figure with no social instincts (he had to train himself to display facial expressions when coworkers complained about his unchanging blank gaze), a gift for making complex financial trades with iffy data under severe time pressure, and a philosophy of “effective altruism” that prodded him to accumulate an 11-figure fortune in order to give it away to good causes. (One save-the-world project was offering Donald Trump money to not run for president in 2024, Lewis reports, a scheme that fizzled when Trump allegedly demanded a $5 billion payment.) Lewis’s narrative is a symphony of comedic discordance—a scene of Bankman-Fried frantically playing video games while Vogue editor Anna Wintour lobbies him to attend the Met Gala is a gem—that coalesces into a reconstruction of FTX’s labyrinthine bankruptcy. Striking a remarkably sympathetic tone, Lewis even implies Bankman-Fried was railroaded and his misdeeds blown out of proportion. (“From a distance, it became almost taboo to raise any doubts about the nature of Sam’s crime. Up close, it was hard not to have such doubts.”) The result is a vastly entertaining and sure to be debated saga of money-making at its weirdest. -
December 1, 2023
The murky world of cryptocurrency as seen through the lens of a now-jailed player. Lewis landed on Sam Bankman-Fried's story at just about the time his short-lived cryptocurrency empire was crumbling. By the author's account, Bankman-Fried seems to have had good intentions: He thought of himself as an evangelist for altruistic investing, and his fortune--and on paper he was worth billions--was intended to "address the biggest existential threats to life on earth: nuclear wars, pandemics far more deadly than Covid, artificial intelligence that turned on mankind and wiped us out, and so on." But Bankman-Fried is socially inept, a poor spokesperson for his own causes; he thinks obliquely, and to a surprising extent, according to the author, he seems to care little about money as such. There's the rub, for, as federal prosecutors are even now exploring, billions of his investors' dollars went missing. That seems not to have been uncommon. "Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers' money," Lewis writes. Was that a criminal act in this case? Lewis ventures no definitive judgment. Instead, to an annoying extent, he seems to explain it away by infantilizing Bankman-Fried, who, at the time of the collapse, "was only twenty-nine years old." That's plenty old enough to be a crook, but Lewis runs with the misunderstood-child trope all the same: "His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends"; "He could see he was different from most other kids"; "He did not have any particular hostility toward governments or banks. He just thought grown-ups were pointless." It's a curious tack that calls some of the author's reporting into question. Not Lewis' best work, but an intriguing portrait with a useful takeaway: Don't invest in crypto.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
