Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Michael Lewis's 2023 non-fiction book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, tells the true story of Sam Bankman-Fried (often known as SBF)—from his unconventional origins and meteoric rise in the world of cryptocurrency to the dramatic collapse of his business empire and its aftermath.
Chapter 1: Yup
The story opens like a scene from a modern financial documentary. SBF appears at the zenith of his fame and influence—a time when he was known as the "world's youngest self-made billionaire" and even compared to "the Gatsby of crypto," with celebrities, CEOs, and world leaders clamoring for his attention and investment. Lewis paints a picture of a disheveled young tycoon: despite his sudden appearance on the Forbes billionaire list, he is always dressed in casual t-shirts and shorts, almost indifferent to the buzz surrounding him. SBF's time becomes incredibly valuable: his schedule is packed with meetings, high-profile forums, and media interviews. Yet, in stark contrast to the grand image others built of him, SBF himself treats commitments as optional. He is often late, cancels at the last minute, or appears distracted even when present.
Through various anecdotes, Lewis highlights SBF's unusual behavior and detached demeanor. For instance, SBF frequently multitasks by playing video games during important conference calls and interviews. In one memorable example, during his first live television interview, he sports his signature messy hair and cargo shorts, and midway through the broadcast, he starts playing an online game, his eyes darting across the screen. (In fact, venture capitalists would later learn he was even playing his favorite game, League of Legends, while pitching them for millions of dollars.) Lewis suggests that, far from being disrespectful, this constant state of gaming was simply SBF's way of keeping his highly active mind engaged—but it meant that those meeting with him often received only a fraction of his attention. This establishes a key theme: SBF is a brilliant but detached figure—a person living inside his own head, treating life as one grand game. This captivating opening sets the tone for the entire story, showcasing the peculiar blend of charm and eccentricity that made SBF both admired and perplexing.
Chapter 2: The Santa Claus Problem
The narrative rewinds to SBF's upbringing and formative years, revealing the shaping of his unique worldview. We learn that SBF was raised in California by two Stanford Law School professors, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, who cultivated a decidedly unconventional household. The Bankman-Frieds weren't keen on typical childhood customs—in fact, one year they completely forgot to celebrate Hanukkah, and when they realized it, no one in the family cared. Holidays, birthdays, the entire myth of Santa Claus—none of it mattered much in SBF's home. Instead, his parents encouraged open, rational inquiry. If a young SBF wanted something, they preferred to discuss it honestly rather than create surprises or follow rituals. As a result, SBF grew up valuing logic and honesty over fictional narratives. He later reflected that seeing almost everyone around him believe in things like God or Santa Claus taught him a stunning lesson: "mass delusion is an endemic property of the world"—in other words, sometimes the majority's view on something can be demonstrably false. This early insight allowed SBF to comfortably question widely accepted beliefs and trust his own reasoning, a trait that would define his future decisions in life and business.
Lewis also delves into SBF's moral and philosophical development during his adolescence. SBF's parents were sympathetic to utilitarianism (a focus on outcomes that produce the greatest good), which influenced him. By age 12, SBF was already independently thinking through deep ethical dilemmas. For example, he considered gay marriage a "no-brainer"—it was clearly unjust to make people suffer for some harmless difference. But he thought more deeply about abortion until he applied a cold, utilitarian calculus. SBF concluded that most of the harms that make murder wrong (the grief of loved ones, the loss of an invested life, etc.) didn't apply before a child was born. For a strict utilitarian like him, abortion became equivalent to birth control—verbally controversial, perhaps, but with no difference in net outcome. This way of weighing decisions by their results, rather than any preset moral dogma, was how SBF, in Lewis's words, "figured out who he was." Socially, a young SBF often felt like an outsider, more absorbed in math puzzles and strategy games than in hanging out with classmates. These childhood threads all converge on what Lewis calls "The Santa Claus Problem": SBF learned early on to question comforting fictions and to approach life through the lens of logic, probability, and maximizing good. The reader now understands how SBF's quirky, hyper-rational personality was shaped from the start—a crucial foundation for his later foray into effective altruism and crypto finance.
Chapter 3: Meta Games
The story moves into SBF's young adulthood and his first steps into the world of high finance. We follow SBF to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he majors in physics—though his interest in pure academic research quickly wanes. In SBF's junior year (2012), two key events set him on a new path. First, a campus career fair introduces him to the lucrative world of trading firms. SBF realizes that almost none of his physics classmates at MIT actually become physicists; instead, many go to Wall Street or tech companies. Curious (and unenthusiastic about physics lab work), SBF submits his resume to several quantitative trading firms recruiting at MIT. He lands interviews with top firms like Susquehanna International Group and Jane Street Capital, renowned for their brain-bending interview questions. This leads to the second key event: SBF's interview at Jane Street, which the book portrays as a series of elaborately designed psychological games.
Michael Lewis describes how Jane Street's hiring process subjects candidates to one "meta-game" after another—from poker variations to coin-flipping betting challenges—where the rules constantly change to test one's adaptability. SBF thrives in this environment. Unlike other interviewees who get flustered by the shifting rules and time pressure, SBF is energized by the chaos. His years of solving logic puzzles and rapidly calculating probabilities have wired his brain for exactly these kinds of challenges. He impresses the Jane Street team with his calm demeanor, his strategic thinking under pressure, and his willingness to make side bets with the interviewers at their encouragement (which is, itself, part of the test). In one example cited in the book, when asked a trick question about the probability of a relative being a professional baseball player, SBF's instinct is to first clarify the question—he recognizes its ambiguity and defines its terms ("What is the scope of 'relative'? How is a 'professional' player defined?") before diving into the math. This rational approach, combined with his quick mental arithmetic, earns him a spot at Jane Street.
With that, SBF enters the world of high-frequency trading in New York. At Jane Street Capital, he proves to be a brilliant trader, applying his love of games to the markets. But more importantly for SBF's grand narrative, Jane Street is where he is first exposed to the philosophy of Effective Altruism (EA). Inspired by utilitarian thinkers, Effective Altruism argues that one should use reason and evidence to do the most good—often by earning vast sums of money and then donating it to high-impact causes. This idea deeply resonates with SBF's logical, idealistic side. He begins to see earning money as a means to an end: the end being to fund causes that could save lives or improve the world on a massive scale. We now see SBF's transformation from a lost student into a driven trader with a mission. SBF now has a guiding purpose for his life: to achieve "going infinite" (i.e., creating immense wealth), not for luxury or ego, but to eventually give it all away in the most effective manner possible. This is the seed of a grand ambition—one that will propel him into the emerging world of cryptocurrency next.
Chapter 4: The March of Progress
Here, the narrative documents SBF's bold leap from employee to entrepreneur—a march of progress that would soon reshape the landscape of cryptocurrency trading. By 2017, SBF had grown restless at Jane Street. He was deeply infected by the spirit of Effective Altruism and eager to multiply his earning potential for the greater good. After a brief stint at an EA non-profit think tank (the Centre for Effective Altruism) to explore a path of direct charity, SBF concluded he could make a bigger impact by making money faster. So, in late 2017, he quit his stable Wall Street job to launch his own trading firm: Alameda Research. It was a risky move—SBF was just 25 and, with a few like-minded friends, was entering what was then the Wild West of cryptocurrency—but he saw a unique opportunity. The global crypto markets at the time were incredibly inefficient, and SBF knew how to exploit that.
Lewis describes how SBF and his small team (initially operating out of an apartment in Berkeley) targeted an arbitrage opportunity commonly known as the "kimchi premium." In early 2018, the price of Bitcoin in some Asian markets, like Japan and South Korea, was significantly higher than in the U.S.—in Korea, sometimes by as much as 20% due to local demand. To SBF, this was essentially free money: buy Bitcoin low in the U.S., sell it high overseas, and repeat. The challenge was in the execution—how to move millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin across borders quickly and legally. SBF's solution was audacious. He and his partners found creative (and somewhat dubious) ways to navigate international banking rules, such as using a friendly local account in South Korea to access the market there. Alameda began moving up to $25 million worth of Bitcoin a day in these trades, reaping huge profits from the price difference. This was the rocket fuel for Alameda's rise. By the end of its first few months, SBF's small startup had generated tens of millions of dollars in profit—tangible proof that his intuition to leave Jane Street was correct.
Following this success, SBF rapidly scaled up Alameda. He hired a group of young colleagues—many of them, like him, Effective Altruists with strong math backgrounds but little formal trading experience. He also attracted significant capital infusions from wealthy crypto believers. Notably, an early backer was Jaan Tallinn (the co-founder of Skype and an active EA investor), who gave SBF's team over $100 million to trade with. All of this embodies the theme of "progress": SBF felt he was riding an inevitable wave of progress—both in the technological revolution of crypto and in his personal journey from trader to empire-builder. By this point, SBF had firmly established Alameda Research as a major player in crypto trading. The once-idealistic physics student was now a full-fledged entrepreneur, sitting on a mountain of cash built from arbitrage profits. It's a period of optimism and energy in the story—SBF appears to be conquering the new world of crypto with sheer intellect and nerve, paving the way for even bigger things to come.
Chapter 5: How to Think About Bob
As the story enters its second act, the tone shifts to the growing pains of SBF's rapidly expanding enterprise. "How to Think About Bob" opens by introducing a key figure in his circle: Caroline Ellison. Caroline is portrayed as a bright but insecure young woman who met SBF during a summer internship at Jane Street. Like SBF, she was gifted at math and drawn to utilitarian ideas. Feeling unfulfilled at Jane Street, Caroline jumped at the chance to join SBF's crypto startup, Alameda Research, in 2018. Lewis notes that Caroline was part of a wave of idealistic "EAs" (Effective Altruists) who left traditional finance jobs seeking purpose at a place like Alameda. Despite her talent, Caroline often lacked confidence and was influenced by the strong personalities around her—including SBF, with whom she eventually began a secret romantic relationship. Her arrival adds a new dynamic to the story, and she would later play a critical role as the firm's leader.
However, SBF's management style soon tested Caroline and the other young members of the team. Alameda had grown to about 20 employees, many of them fresh out of college with no trading experience, hired more for their intelligence and shared philosophy than for their financial résumés. SBF ran the firm with a chaotic, ad-hoc style. He insisted on being the central hub to whom everyone reported directly, yet he struggled to truly communicate with and listen to his team. There was no clear structure or risk control like what he had seen at Jane Street. Employees grew frustrated—directives were often unclear or last-minute, and decisions felt capricious. SBF himself was deeply enmeshed in the minutiae of trading, sometimes neglecting basic management. Under his watch, Alameda's finances became a mess: the firm made large bets, some of which went badly, and millions of dollars could mysteriously "go missing" without being promptly addressed. In one infamous incident, $4 million worth of a cryptocurrency (Ripple, or XRP) vanished from Alameda's accounts during a transfer—and SBF's reaction was surprisingly nonchalant. He "hated telling investors about the problem" and casually said there was an 80% chance of recovering the funds. To his colleagues, this was a red flag: SBF seemed indifferent to massive risks and losses that terrified others.
Tensions within Alameda came to a head in the spring of 2018 in an event that became known as "The Schism." A group of senior employees—including Alameda co-founder Tara Mac Aulay—lost faith in SBF's leadership. They were alarmed by his cavalier attitude toward risk and his lack of proper accounting. After the Ripple incident and other trading losses, these employees secretly voiced their concerns to Alameda's investors and even made a $1 million buyout offer to SBF to walk away from the company he started. SBF flatly refused. In April 2018, about half of Alameda's staff resigned en masse, concluding, as one of them put it, that SBF was "not someone we wanted to be in business with." This dramatic split forced SBF to regroup. Shortly after, he moved Alameda's headquarters from California to Hong Kong, seeking a fresh start in a location more conducive to 24/7 crypto trading. A sobering picture now emerges: while Alameda was making money, its internal turmoil exposed the cracks in SBF's methods. The same single-minded drive that fueled his rise was now sowing conflict with his colleagues. The stage is set for SBF to either learn from these missteps—or to forge ahead unchanged as bigger ambitions beckoned.
Chapter 6: Artificial Love
At this point, SBF sets his sights on a much grander project: creating a brand-new cryptocurrency exchange. This chapter, titled "Artificial Love," documents the birth of FTX (launched in 2019) and how SBF poured his vision into it. Having learned from the flaws of existing exchanges, SBF and his small team of developers (notably including his former college roommate and brilliant programmer, Gary Wang) designed FTX to be a superior trading platform. Lewis walks us through the technical ingenuity behind FTX's rise. At the time, many crypto exchanges offered high-risk derivatives and margin trading, but their risk management was crude—if one trader's losses exceeded their collateral, the exchange would socialize the loss by taking money from other users' funds. (For example, on one exchange, a single out-of-control trade catastrophically wiped out half the profits of all winning traders to cover the loser's debt.) SBF saw this as an unacceptable weakness. FTX, therefore, implemented an innovative auto-liquidation system: the platform would continuously monitor every account, and "the moment any customer's trade went into the red, it was instantly liquidated." This was brutal for the losing trader, but it meant FTX itself would never be on the hook for a massive loss—no more bailouts with other customers' money. Thanks to Gary's programming, FTX's engine was fast and automated enough to do this in real time. This design was a key selling point: FTX promised no more exchange-wide blow-ups, a message that attracted sophisticated traders who had been burned elsewhere.
"Artificial Love" also highlights how quickly FTX grew after its launch. SBF proved to be very adept at attracting investors and partners to scale his new exchange. He even brought in major figures like Changpeng "CZ" Zhao—the CEO of Binance, the world's largest exchange—as an early investor. (Ironically, CZ would later become his rival in FTX's downfall.) SBF's colleague, Ramnik Arora, is introduced as a master storyteller who helped pitch FTX to venture capital firms. The book describes the process of raising money for FTX as being less about spreadsheets and more about selling a vision. SBF and Ramnik told a compelling story: crypto trading was exploding (with hundreds of billions in daily volume), FTX had grown from nothing to the world's fifth-largest exchange in 18 months, and unlike their competitors, they were trying to be a compliant, "legit" player that regulators could trust. Venture capitalists ate it up. By early 2022, FTX had secured a staggering $32 billion valuation in a Series C funding round, pushing SBF's own net worth into the tens of billions. The company's meteoric growth placed it second only to Binance in global crypto trading volume.
Amidst all this success, SBF's personal eccentricities bled into company life. SBF continued to approach everything—even love and relationships, which perhaps hints at the "artificial" part of the title—with a cool, analytical lens. (The book alludes to the unusual co-living arrangements and messy romances within his inner circle.) We also see SBF's relentless workaholism: he was famous for sleeping very little, constantly multitasking, and using stimulants to maintain his pace (he often joked about taking Adderall or caffeine). In late 2021, SBF made the pivotal decision to move FTX's headquarters from Hong Kong to The Bahamas, seeking a more favorable regulatory environment and a tropical lifestyle for his team. In Nassau, Bahamas, he began building a grand new campus for FTX and housed his closest colleagues (including Caroline, Gary, Nishad Singh, and others) in a luxury penthouse. FTX, at this moment, is at its peak: an exchange built on clever engineering and fueled by crypto mania. SBF, not yet 30, is now more than a trader—he is the public face of a crypto empire, rubbing shoulders with politicians and celebrities. The "game" he started has now become incredibly real, and the world is watching—setting the stage for a coming clash between SBF's lofty ideals and the harsh realities of business and politics.
Chapter 7: The ORG Chart
This section pulls back the curtain on the day-to-day operations of FTX and reveals just how unconventional and chaotic the company was behind its glossy valuation. By 2022, FTX was a global behemoth handling billions of dollars in trades, yet internally, it operated more like a college dorm project than a Fortune 500 company. Lewis illustrates this with a darkly humorous episode: two professional architects are hired to design FTX's new headquarters in The Bahamas, but when they ask basic questions—How many people will work here? How are the teams organized?—no one at FTX can tell them. The company literally had no formal organizational chart or management hierarchy to guide the architects. In fact, the only person who had ever tried to draw one up was George Lerner, SBF's personal therapist, who had been informally given a role as a sort of "corporate shrink" and life coach for the staff. Lerner's org chart was created mainly to deal with interpersonal issues (the young employees had plenty of drama), not because SBF or other executives cared to establish one. This anecdote highlights a theme: FTX's culture was deliberately unstructured and chaotic. SBF believed rigid structures could slow down innovation, so he let the company evolve in a loose, ad-hoc manner. Employees often created their own job titles and jumped between roles. Communication was casual; important decisions might be made in late-night online chats or not at all.
The story also delves into the lifestyle and values of the FTX compound in The Bahamas. Many of the top employees, including SBF, lived together in a luxury penthouse, working and socializing in the same space nearly 24/7. They were mostly in their twenties, fiercely intelligent, and bonded by the ideals of Effective Altruism—but this closeness led to an insular "bubble." There were reports (in the book and in the media) of a casual attitude toward office romances and even the use of stimulants to sustain working hours. SBF's inner circle had a complex web of personal relationships—at one point, it was said that the ten people in the penthouse had paired off into a romantic "polycule." While Lewis doesn't gossip, he highlights these details to show that FTX was anything but a conventional corporate environment. It was more like a tech startup on steroids, with a group of brilliant but inexperienced people trying to build a new world while also figuring out their own lives.
Meanwhile, actual oversight was non-existent. One consequence was that FTX's financial and compliance practices were extraordinarily weak for a company of its size. In a tone of near disbelief, Lewis recounts the later assessment of FTX's new CEO, John J. Ray III: in his entire career, he had never seen "such a complete failure of corporate controls" (and Ray had overseen the Enron bankruptcy). We see the reasons here—accounts went untracked, basic bookkeeping was an afterthought, and things like risk management were nominal at best. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) this chaos, FTX was outwardly thriving. The company's lack of structure may have even helped it move quickly during the frenzy of the 2021 crypto bull run. But Lewis leaves us with a sense of foreboding: the edifice of FTX was, organizationally speaking, built on sand. Everyone was too busy chasing growth and grand ideas to notice the shaky foundations. This chapter is the calm before the storm—an almost surreal picture of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise being run with the informality of a college club, with consequences that were about to come crashing down.
Chapter 8: The Dragon's Hoard
The narrative's focus shifts to the money—piles and piles of it—and what SBF was doing with it. At this stage, SBF was not just a business leader but an emerging philanthropist and political influencer, eager to deploy his wealth (or "hoard," as the title suggests) toward the causes he believed in. Lewis details how SBF began funneling funds from Alameda and FTX into a myriad of venture investments and donations. True to his Effective Altruist roots, SBF set up initiatives like the FTX Future Fund to support projects he thought could have a massive impact on humanity. The chapter reads like a laundry list of SBF's lavish spending: he poured money into scientific research for pandemic prevention, funded organizations working on AI safety and other existential risk reduction, and invested in everything from biotech startups to media companies. Much of this aligned with EA principles—in essence, SBF was trying to buy global change according to his utilitarian calculus.
But SBF's ambitions didn't stop at philanthropy. The story also covers his foray into the world of politics and influence. In the U.S., SBF became a major donor to the Democratic Party in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles (though he also quietly donated to some Republicans, by some accounts). He focused particularly on pandemic preparedness legislation and candidates who supported it, believing better policy could save lives. One of the most eye-popping revelations in the book is an alleged plot where SBF considered paying Donald Trump not to run for president. According to Lewis, SBF explored whether a massive bribe could persuade Trump to sit out the 2024 race—an idea that highlights both SBF's audacity and his moral calculus (he likely saw it as preventing what he viewed as a greater harm). The book claims that Trump's intermediaries floated a number: $5 billion. SBF ultimately decided he couldn't afford it, and the plan went nowhere. Still, the mere fact that SBF would consider using his wealth to so directly intervene in politics is stunning, and Lewis presents it as an example of SBF's grandiose delusions of manipulating outcomes.
However, just as SBF was spreading his money far and wide, trouble was brewing in the markets that had made him rich. In mid-2022, the broader cryptocurrency market crashed—a sharp downturn often called the "crypto winter." Major crypto assets plummeted in value, and some collapsed entirely. The failure of the Terra/Luna stablecoin project in May 2022, for instance, triggered cascading losses across the industry. This section describes how this market crash shrank SBF's empire overnight and put financial pressure on both Alameda and FTX. Alameda, in particular, saw the value of many of its investments plummet. Suddenly, the "dragon's hoard" was no longer inexhaustible; it was shrinking fast. Yet, SBF remained outwardly optimistic and continued spending as if nothing had happened. This leaves the reader with a sense of dramatic irony—just as SBF was making his boldest plays with his wealth, the very foundation of that wealth (the crypto market) was crumbling beneath his feet. The stage is now set for the final act: the vanishing of all that wealth and the revelation of the real secret behind SBF's success.
Chapter 9: The Vanishing
The chapter title "The Vanishing" is apt, as it documents the spectacular collapse of FTX—a swift downfall that shocked customers and observers around the globe. The story unfolds like a tense thriller, recounting the events of November 2022, when confidence in SBF's exchange evaporated almost overnight. It all began with rumors and revelations. A leaked report raised serious questions about the solvency of Alameda Research, suggesting that a huge portion of Alameda's assets were actually in FTT (FTX's own exchange token) and other illiquid tokens, not stable cash or liquid crypto. This implied that FTX and Alameda were dangerously entangled financially. As this news spread, rival CEO CZ of Binance publicly announced he would be selling off Binance's large holdings of FTT—a move that spooked the market and signaled that insiders smelled trouble. What followed was a bank run on FTX. Panicked that FTX might be insolvent, ordinary customers rushed to withdraw their funds en masse. Within a matter of days in early November, FTX faced a liquidity crisis: it simply did not have enough cash on hand to honor everyone's withdrawals.
Lewis describes the frantic attempts by SBF and his team to save the company during those critical days. SBF initially assured the public (and his employees) that assets were fine, but internally FTX was scrambling to raise some $7-8 billion to plug the hole in its balance sheet. They reached out to deep-pocketed investors, partners—anyone who might inject emergency cash. For a brief moment, a lifeline seemed to appear: on November 8, Binance signed a non-binding letter of intent to acquire FTX and pay its debts. SBF told everyone the deal with CZ would resolve the crisis. However, that hope was just as quickly dashed—the very next day, Binance backed out of the deal after reviewing FTX's financials, citing issues that were "beyond our control" (likely the discovery of a multi-billion-dollar shortfall). With no savior in sight, FTX's fate was sealed. By November 11, 2022, SBF had resigned as CEO, and FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In The Bahamas, where FTX Digital Markets was based, authorities froze FTX's assets and began an investigation.
The human side of this collapse is also vividly portrayed. As FTX imploded, most of its employees fled The Bahamas in a hurry, catching the next available flight out of Nassau. The once-bustling FTX office became a ghost town. One of the few who stayed behind was COO Constance Wang, who was unable to leave because she had two pet cats and couldn't arrange transport for them both on short notice. She and a handful of others remained, trying to piece together what had just happened. For SBF's inner circle, it was a moment of terror and bewilderment—their life's work had been reduced to rubble in a matter of days. The chapter conveys the confusion and betrayal felt by many as billions of dollars simply "vanished" from the exchange. Users around the world watched as their account balances were suddenly frozen or zeroed out. It's the dramatic turning point of the story: in just a few days, SBF went from a celebrated industry leader to the suspect in one of the biggest financial disasters in modern history. The final chapters will deal with the aftermath and the search for truth amid the ruins.
Chapter 10: Manfred
This section explores the immediate aftermath of the FTX collapse and peels back the final layers of SBF's character. The title refers to Manfred, SBF's childhood stuffed animal—a toy he had kept with him since he was a small child and often traveled with as an adult. This poignant detail, noted by Lewis, symbolizes SBF clinging to something constant and comforting even as his world fell apart. Amid the ruins of FTX, we follow Constance Wang—one of the last employees remaining in The Bahamas—as she begins to dig into FTX's books to understand the massive hole in its finances. Gaining access to internal documents, Constance makes a stunning discovery: over $10 billion in FTX customer funds had been moved to SBF's trading firm, Alameda Research. In essence, FTX had lent out all of its customers' deposits to Alameda, and worse, Alameda had special privileges on the platform. Constance learns that FTX's vaunted risk engine, which was supposed to quickly liquidate losing positions, did not apply to Alameda—SBF's firm was allowed to run a negative balance and keep losing trades open indefinitely. In short, SBF had gamed his own system: Alameda could never be automatically closed out of a bad trade, which meant it could use customer money to rack up a massive debt to FTX. This was the secret that explained everything—how Alameda was able to use FTX as a cash machine to make huge, leveraged bets (some on speculative tokens or illiquid projects) and why, when those bets failed, FTX was unable to pay back its users.
Lewis also highlights a personal discovery for Constance: despite being an early executive, she found she owned almost no stake in the company. A document revealed she had just 0.04% of FTX—a negligible amount—while others at her level or even lower had significantly more. It was a sharp realization for her that SBF had kept tight control of the equity for himself and a select few, leaving even loyal colleagues with crumbs. This was another hint at how unequal, and perhaps cynical, the reality was behind SBF's altruistic halo.
As authorities closed in, SBF himself remained in a state of denial and resistance. For a short time after the bankruptcy, he holed up in Nassau, still insisting that FTX could be saved or that it was all just an accounting mistake. But the story moves toward its inevitable conclusion: in December 2022, SBF was arrested at his apartment in The Bahamas by local police at the request of U.S. prosecutors. The once-celebrated CEO was led away in handcuffs, eventually landing in the notorious Bahamian prison, Fox Hill, before being extradited to the United States. Michael Lewis, who had access to SBF during his downfall, provides one last close-up view, noting that the young man who had always treated life as a series of logic puzzles was now facing a reality that couldn't be gamed. Even at this low point, the book presents an almost tragic image: SBF packing his old childhood toy, Manfred, for the journey, perhaps as a symbol of innocence or comfort amidst the chaos. It's a humanizing detail that reminds the reader that behind the headlines of fraud and failure was a very peculiar, brilliant, and flawed individual. The stage is now set for the reckoning: all the truths SBF had evaded or rationalized were now catching up to him.
Chapter 11: Truth Serum
This final section reads like the investigative climax of the story—the focus shifts to uncovering the truth and assigning accountability in the wake of FTX's collapse. Here, Lewis follows the work of John J. Ray III, the seasoned restructuring expert appointed as the new CEO of FTX after its bankruptcy. Ray's job was to stabilize the wreckage and find out where the money went. What he found was chilling. Ray, who had previously handled infamous bankruptcies like Enron, stated that FTX was the worst mess he had ever seen. The story details how Ray and his team slowly piece together the financial records of FTX/Alameda (which were in shambles). Over time, they manage to recover billions of dollars in assets for creditors—by locating bank accounts, crypto wallets, and investments that could be sold off. This was a significant development: while it initially seemed like $8-10 billion had vanished into thin air, by diligently tracing the funds, Ray's team was able to claw back a substantial portion, though still just a fraction of the total owed.
Lewis also covers the legal fallout and the cooperating witnesses who emerged—a stark contrast to SBF's own position. Key members of SBF's inner circle turned against him and pleaded guilty to crimes. Caroline Ellison, who had served as CEO of Alameda, admitted to fraud charges and confessed that she and SBF had knowingly misused FTX customer funds. Likewise, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Director of Engineering Nishad Singh also pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators. Their testimony essentially confirmed what Constance and John Ray had found in the documents: that SBF had directed them to do it. They described how SBF authorized the use of FTX deposits to cover Alameda's losses and to make loans to himself and others, and how Alameda enjoyed special privileges on the exchange. In the narrative, it's as if a truth serum was finally compelling people to speak about what was really happening inside SBF's empire—not through SBF's own words, but through the words of his closest colleagues as they faced prison time.
SBF, however, maintained his innocence and a sense of bewilderment at the charges. Right up until his trial, he publicly claimed (through interviews and writings) that it was all a giant misunderstanding or a string of bad luck, not deliberate fraud. Lewis, who maintained extensive access to SBF even after the collapse, relays SBF's various explanations—for instance, that FTX could have been made solvent if someone had just injected a few more billion, or that he never intended to steal money. This leaves the reader to judge these claims against the mountain of evidence. By the end, the wheels of justice are in full motion: SBF is charged with multiple counts of federal fraud and conspiracy, and his trial looms. The sheer scale of the collapse is also put into context—it not only triggered billions in investor losses but also shattered trust in the crypto industry and sparked calls for much stricter regulation.
In closing, Lewis conveys a bittersweet sense. He suggests that the saga of SBF is more than just one man's rise and fall—it's a cautionary tale about hubris, trust, and the allure of innovation without guardrails. Even as SBF awaits his fate, the reader is left with the feeling that the "truth serum" is still working its way through the system, as regulators, journalists, and the public parse the lessons to be learned. The story thus ends not with a moral lecture, but with a sober accounting of what happened: a young genius tried to remake finance and do good on an epic scale, but in the process of breaking the rules and trusting only his own instincts, he unleashed a catastrophe. In the end, reality caught up to SBF, as it does to all well-played games.
Coda
In the two years since the book was finalized, reality has written a more concrete postscript to this saga. On March 28, 2024, SBF was sentenced in New York to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit approximately $11 billion in assets, with his case proceeding to appeal. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, his expected release date is November 17, 2044.
His place of incarceration has also changed several times, moving from a detention center in New York to Oklahoma, then briefly to a medium-security prison in Victorville, California, before finally being placed in the low-security federal prison "Terminal Island" in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, his appeal is ongoing, with various media outlets reporting that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals plans to hold oral arguments in early November 2025.
Parallel to the criminal case is the bankruptcy restructuring of FTX. The plan was confirmed by the court in October 2024 and became effective in January 2025, followed by several rounds of cash distributions. The goal of the restructuring is to repay the vast majority of customers in full, with interest, based on the U.S. dollar value of their assets in November 2022. However, this plan has sparked significant controversy, centering on whether subsequent increases in cryptocurrency prices should be included in the compensation.
When these real-world pieces are put together, the rise and fall chronicled by Michael Lewis feels more like an open-ended footnote of our time: a court conviction, creditor repayments, a pending appeal—a stark contrast between lofty ideals and the cold realities of the system. Going Infinite does not defend any party; it simply reminds us that young talent and the ambition to "do good," when lacking boundaries and accountability, can produce both astonishing achievements and unimaginable disasters. When the storm passes, what truly remains are the ledgers, the evidence trail, and the long road of due process.
