Going Infinite - Michael Lewis

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• Natalie Tien was raised in Taiwan and pushed by her parents to find a rich husband, though she was ambitious for career success instead.

• She got her first job at an English training company but was bored. In 2018 she discovered cryptocurrency and felt it could be the next big thing.

• She worked for two Asian crypto exchanges that mainly cared about money and appearance over qualifications.

• In June 2020 she joined FTX, the 49th employee, which was different run by Sam Bankman-Fried who was not interested in money or women primarily.

• At FTX the expectation was to work all the time with no life outside, but Natalie was promoted to head of public relations within months despite no PR experience.

• FTX hired people quickly based more on talent than qualifications and grew rapidly, a contrast to other more appearance-focused crypto exchanges Natalie had worked for.

• When Natalie first joined Sam’s company, he didn’t believe in public relations or talking to journalists. Natalie had to persuade both Sam and journalists to talk to each other.

• In July 2020, no journalists were interested in Sam or his crypto exchange FTX. Natalie continued pushing Sam and journalists to connect.

• In May 2021, Sam had his first TV interview on Bloomberg, still displaying his disheveled appearance and odd behavior like playing video games during the interview. Natalie thought this oddness could work to his benefit.

• Forbes soon contacted Natalie to fact-check reports that Sam, at 29, had become the richest person under 30 through FTX and his trading firm Alameda. His wealth was difficult to precisely value given his crypto holdings.

• Forbes listed Sam’s net worth at $22.5 billion in November 2021, cementing his fame. Sam realized PR’s value, and Natalie’s job expanded to managing Sam’s busy schedule and mysterious whereabouts. She had to learn how to predict and influence his unpredictable behaviors.

• Natalie is Sam’s public relations manager who handles his scheduling and manages the fallout from his unpredictable behavior.

• Sam treats his schedule as optional and flexible, often agreeing to commitments but then changing his mind last minute based on shifting probability calculations in his head. This causes chaos and forces Natalie to constantly apologize and make excuses.

• On Valentine’s Day, Sam has a scheduled Zoom call with Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, but he is playing an online video game during the call instead of paying attention. He says “yup” to acknowledge Wintour without truly listening.

• Sam was late for and unprepared for the call with Wintour because he had a chaotic few days in LA meeting many famous people but Natalie isn’t sure where he slept. His hotel room was untouched.

• Sam doesn’t fully understand or care who Wintour is, but feels obligated to meet with important people. He uses games like Storybook Brawl to occupy his mind during meetings rather than focus on the conversations.

• Sam Bankman-Fried was playing an online battle game involving heroes and creatures while on a Zoom call. His hero, the Hoard Dragon, was being attacked by other players’ heroes.

• Sam was distracted from the game by the call with Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine. She was trying to get Sam involved with and donate money to the annual Met Gala fundraising event.

• Sam did not know much about the Met Gala but pretended to be interested to appease Anna Wintour. Due to the distraction, his Hoard Dragon hero died in the online game.

• The discussion turned to Sam’s large political donations. He revealed he had given over $5 million to Biden’s campaign and plans to donate billions to the next presidential election.

• Anna Wintour used the opportunity to promote Pete Buttigieg and try to schedule an in-person meeting with Sam. However, Sam gave vague responses about his locations and schedule to avoid committing.

• When Anna Wintour had obtained what she wanted from the call, she cordially ended it. Sam was relieved to get back to his online game and other activities without her distraction.

• Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to be a special guest at the 2022 Met Gala but wasn’t enthusiastic about attending. FTX employees explored outfit designs from Louis Vuitton and Tom Ford but Sam remained disengaged.

• Sam had disdain for the fashion industry and how physical appearance shapes people’s lives. He viewed Anna Wintour and the Met Gala as representing priorities he disliked.

• While Sam contemplated possible marketing benefits, he struggled to see the point of attending. By May 1st he still hadn’t committed either way.

• When Sam ultimately declined, Anna Wintour’s team was outraged. But Natalie Tien, Sam’s advisor, was surprised by their reaction since Sam often backed out of commitments.

• The summary explores Sam’s atypical childhood and disinterest in typical childhood activities. It notes his parents’ concern that he may not fit in normally but their recognition that parenting him required a different approach. Sam himself realized around ages 8-10 that he was different from peers in how he thought about things like Santa Claus.

• Sam’s parents did not observe traditional religious or cultural holidays and rituals like Hanukkah, birthdays, or Christmas with gifts. They took a more open, honest discussion-based approach to wants and needs instead of forcing cultural conventions.

• They also did not believe in marrying legally but had a civil union in silent protest of gay marriage not being legal. Sam was unaware of this as a child.

• Sam was surprised to learn other children really believed in Santa Claus and God as real entities. He questioned adults about belief in God but found them evasive.

• This led Sam to realize mass delusions were possible and most people could be wrong about something while he was right, and neither side would convince the other.

• In middle school Sam realized he was depressed due to a lack of positive feelings, not outward negativity. Advanced math classes engaged him for the first time.

• At a prestigious private high school, Sam still felt bored and above his peers, who he saw as unambitious and not driven. He stood out by not socializing or fitting in with others.

• Sam was viewed as smart but not popular in school. He was the butt of jokes but didn’t fit in with any social groups. He felt the other students’ assessment of him as “smart and inoffensive” captured him accurately.

• By high school, Sam disliked school even though he was at the top of his class. He felt English class in particular was subjective and arbitrary, grading interpretations of books rather than the books themselves. This made him lose interest in reading.

• At MIT, Sam challenged his film history professor on the first exam question about differentiating art from entertainment. He found little value in humanities classes.

• Sam felt detached from activities that gave others pleasure, like art, religion and politics. He disliked family rituals and didn’t celebrate his birthday. The only thing he was fully engaged in was the strategy card game Magic: The Gathering.

• Through playing Magic, Sam made his only real childhood friend Matt. They competed together and bonded over rational gameplay without social demands. Matt understood Sam in a way few others did.

• Sam’s early life was defined as much by what didn’t happen as what did. He felt isolated from other kids and they didn’t understand him. He defended his differences through a sense of shallow superiority.

• He was interested in philosophy but felt libertarianism blurred selfishness and philosophy. He took more to his parents’ utilitarian views of considering collective good.

• At math camp he found other gifted kids and realized he was average among them. However, he felt he excelled at unusual problem-solving.

• In college, he lost interest in physics but became curious about quantitative finance firms recruiting at MIT. Meanwhile, he created complex puzzles online to find other intelligent problem-solvers.

• These events marked a shift for Sam away from isolation and toward connecting with others through shared interests in unusual problems and a utilitarian mindset focused on broad social impacts rather than just individual concerns. Math camp and his puzzles revealed a community where his skills were valued.

• Sam was a physics major in college who started to become disillusioned with the academic path, feeling like it didn’t focus enough on making real-world impact.

• At a job fair, he was surprised to learn that some Wall Street firms recruit physics majors as traders. He applied and got interviews with Jane Street Capital, a high-frequency trading firm.

• The interviews were unlike any Sam had experienced. They involved mental math puzzles and odd games designed to assess decision-making under uncertainty.

• One game involved a meta version of poker with weird rule variations and side bets. Another involved flipping differently weighted coins to win chips based on predicting heads/tails.

• The games had a layer of complexity in that they were really “games about games” - the goal was to understand what the game was really testing.

• Sam realized time pressure benefited him as he could stay calm and think clearly under it, unlike most others. His instinct was to gather just enough information to make good probabilistic judgments rather than search futilely for perfect certainty.

• This impressed the Jane Street interviewers and indicated he had the kind of analytical, fast thinking required for high-frequency trading.

• Sam met with traders at Jane Street Capital, a high-frequency trading firm, for job interviews. They tested him with puzzles and problems meant to expose blind spots in his thinking.

• One trader asked what the odds were that he had a relative who played professional baseball. Sam worked through calculating the statistics and probabilities, then realized the question itself hinted the trader likely did have such a relative, shifting the odds.

• Sam did exceptionally well on all the tests, better than any other applicant. He realized these types of puzzles were testing something very different from his strengths in math and games.

• Inspired by his success, philosopher Will Crouch reached out to Sam out of the blue from Oxford University. Crouch was a follower of philosopher Peter Singer, whose influential 1971 essay argued affluent people had a moral duty to donate to save lives from poverty.

• Singer’s essay launched debates but ultimately ordinary people ignored his radical view. However, it influenced Sam and Crouch’s ideas about using their advantages to help others as much as possible. Crouch invited Sam to meet and potentially get involved in their group.

• Effective altruism started as an idea proposed by Peter Singer, but a group of young philosophers at Oxford put it into practice in 2009. Toby Ord donated part of his salary to charity and explained his reasoning, spurring a movement.

• Will MacAskill recruited students on campus to join the cause of using careers to maximize lives saved. He framed career choices in terms of quantitatively maximizing lives saved over a lifetime.

• MacAskill argued that careers like banking that enable donations could save more lives than careers like doctoring. He called this “earn to give.” This appealed to students with math/science backgrounds.

• Sam, a physics student at MIT, was impacted by MacAskill’s arguments. He interned at Jane Street Capital the next summer with the goal of earn to give.

• Though Sam excelled at trading games, his social skills were lacking. Fellow intern Asher Mellman approached Sam one day to make a bet, even though Sam disliked Asher.

So in summary, it outlines the origins and ideas of the effective altruism movement, how it appealed to Sam, and his internship at Jane Street Capital where social issues arose despite his talents in trading games.

• Asher Mellman proposed a bet to Sam about the amount of money any Jane Street intern would lose gambling that day, with a range between $0-100.

• Sam saw this as potentially adverse selection, since Asher was approaching him to bet. However, he agreed to bet Asher as a “buyer” at $50. Asher countered at $65.

• To maximize Asher’s losses, Sam started offering coin flip bets to other interns where they would win $1 but could lose up to $99.75. This benefited both Sam and the other interns due to positive expected value.

• Sam won the first three coin flips, humiliating Asher. The fourth flip Sam lost. While Sam saw it as a game, others were uncomfortable with Asher’s humiliation.

• Jane Street bosses later expressed dismay that Sam continued the coin flips after the first, seeing he understood the effect on others but prioritized “proving his point” over others’ feelings. Sam felt they misunderstood that he understood people well but wasn’t understood himself.

• The Jane Street trading floor was loud with game sound effects to alert traders, though some candidates found it distracting when interviewing by phone. Sam enjoyed being immersed in the environment while others found it stressful.

• The passage describes Sam Bankman-Fried’s work as a trader at Jane Street Capital in 2014, where he specialized in trading international exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

• His role was to keep the prices of ETFs aligned with the prices of their underlying assets (stocks, bonds, etc.). He would buy ETFs if their price fell below the value of the assets, and vice versa.

• Much of his day was spent determining the precise composition of ETFs as their contents changed overnight. He also had to account for transaction costs and taxes when trading the underlying assets.

• Trading could be complicated by delays, such as having to wait for Indian stock exchanges to open before completing trades involving Indian stocks.

• Overall, the passage provides context about Sam’s job and responsibilities as an ETF trader at Jane Street in 2014.

• Trading Indian stocks through an ETF would require considering who the ultimate buyer is and whether other traders have better information. He’d also need to consider the possibility of other traders front-running the trade. Decisions had to be made quickly, often within 15 seconds.

• These ETF trades weren’t riskless. Traders were trying to identify weighted coins (opportunities) where the odds were in their favor, but often the best they could do was a 53-47 coin. Even weighted coins could land the wrong way sometimes, so the firm could lose money on trades.

• Jane Street aimed to reduce risk by having many traders make many trades, relying on the law of averages. But they still occasionally had losing days, weeks or months. The biggest risk was not finding enough trading opportunities.

• Traders looked for ways to automate decisions to increase volume and speed. The goal was to teach machines to make certain judgments so traders could focus on finding new opportunities.

• Traders studied markets to identify statistical patterns missed by others to gain an edge. They would trade on these patterns to make money but also needed to explain the patterns.

• Many profitable patterns arose from exploiting poorly designed trading algorithms or behaviors of other traders.

• Jane Street traders developed a plan to obtain election results faster than mainstream media sources like CNN by assigning traders to closely monitor data from key states. Their goal was to profit off market moves in response to election news.

• On election night, their system worked and they were able to get results seconds to hours before CNN. They made profitable trades each time results swung the odds towards Trump or Clinton.

• However, overnight the markets reacted differently than expected - rallying instead of falling as Trump’s victory sunk in. Jane Street’s large bet against the US market turned into a $300 million loss, their worst trade ever.

• The firm did little postmortem and decided not to trade on elections again, which bothered some like Sam. While process-focused, they failed to improve their strategy for next time.

• Jane Street strongly incentivized and retained employees like Sam through high pay, but he was personally unhappy despite outward success, feeling unfulfilled in his work.

• Sam worked at Jane Street as a trader but didn’t feel much happiness or connection to others there. He acknowledged they had given him value but didn’t feel gratitude.

• He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one, making decisions based on logical arguments rather than emotions.

• Two people had previously convinced him to change his views/actions through rational arguments - becoming a vegetarian after talking to a friend, and committing to effective altruism after talking to Will MacAskill.

• Despite his success at Jane Street, Sam wondered if it was the best use of his skills and estimated the value of other potential paths.

• In 2017 he took his first vacation in 3 years from Jane Street. The cryptocurrency market was booming with little oversight. Sam estimated he could capture 5% of the market and make $30-365 million per year.

• He told his friend Adam he could make $1 billion, though Adam was skeptical. Sam then decided to leave Jane Street to pursue cryptocurrency trading.

• Caroline Ellison initially found Sam terrifying when she interned at Jane Street but later worked for him and regretted it, finding the work unsatisfying.

• Caroline was sponsored by Jane Street Trading to recruit math-minded young people to work there, similar to how she was recruited from college. She was attracted to effective altruism’s quantitative, rigorous approach to doing good.

• She worked at Jane Street but wasn’t as passionate about it as Sam. She had doubts about its impact and wanted a more normal life.

• She had an emotionally draining relationship with another Jane Street trader, Eric Mannes, who didn’t reciprocate her feelings.

• Sam recruited her to join his new crypto trading firm Alameda Research. She quit Jane Street despite resistance from her manager.

• At Alameda, she found Sam was an absent leader who demanded long hours from others but didn’t keep them himself. The firm’s finances were in disarray after losing millions from trading and unaccounted funds.

• The management team was in crisis and wanted to leave due to Sam’s poor leadership despite his vision of being a central decision-maker. Caroline had doubts about joining Alameda after the difficulties she found there.

• Sam started a cryptocurrency trading company called Alameda Research with the goals of making a billion dollars and donating profits to effective altruism causes.

• He recruited Gary Wang, a brilliant programmer he knew from MIT who was silent and introspective, to be the chief technology officer.

• Sam also recruited Tara MacAulay, who had been successfully trading cryptocurrencies in her personal account and generating high returns.

• Sam wanted to develop automated trading bots called “Modelbot” that could trade cryptocurrencies 24/7 exploiting small price inefficiencies across exchanges.

• However, the other managers at Alameda Research were opposed to Modelbot, worrying it could lose all their money quickly. There was a conflict between Sam’s risky approach and the others’ desire for more caution.

• Within a few weeks, the situation deteriorated as the other managers lost trust in Sam and convinced investors to pull their funding, leaving Alameda Research without money to trade.

• Nishad Singh was Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother’s best friend from high school. They both became effective altruists interested in donating earnings to help others.

• After graduating from UC Berkeley, Nishad took a high-paying job at Facebook but lost interest in the work. He was intrigued when he learned Sam had quit Jane Street to make money for effective altruism through crypto trading.

• Nishad witnessed Sam make a large profit through some quick crypto trades and was interested in learning more to contribute. Despite no trading experience, Sam said Nishad could help code the trading system.

• In the early chaotic days, profits came from exploiting price discrepancies between crypto exchanges in different countries like South Korea and the US. One strategy involved trading bitcoin and Ripple between the two markets.

• However, regulatory issues made directly trading currencies between the countries difficult. Sam briefly considered unconventional ideas like flying people between South Korea and Japan with cash to exploit the price differences.

• They eventually settled on a strategy trading bitcoin and Ripple between the two markets, exploiting larger price premiums for Ripple in South Korea to generate profits. However, this strategy ran into issues when a large amount of Ripple went missing one day.

• Alameda Research was making 250,000 cryptocurrency trades per day, trading mainly Ripple and Bitcoin.

• They realized $4 million worth of Ripple was missing from their accounts. Sam believed it was delayed in transit between exchanges but would eventually turn up. Others disagreed.

• During a 2-week trading halt, it was confirmed millions of dollars worth of Ripple was missing. Everyone except Sam was upset about this.

• Sam continued insisting the missing Ripple wasn’t a big deal and there was an 80% chance it would be found. Others argued this would be seen as fraud after the fact if it wasn’t recovered.

• Losing hundreds of millions that could help causes went against the firm’s purpose. But Sam insisted on continuing to trade, while losses mounted.

• The others wanted to remove Sam as CEO since he was a poor manager and too reckless. But Sam owned the company.

• After tense negotiations to buy Sam out failed, Nishad tried to mediate but felt both sides were acting extremely. The future of the company remained unclear.

• Ruists (presumably investors) were charging high interest rates of 50% on loans to Sam’s company. Nishad described it as a “shark loan.”

• Sam refused to share equity with others in what was meant to be a collaborative enterprise.

• When management and half the employees quit, they demanded millions in severance pay and tried to damage Sam’s reputation until they received the money.

• The outside investors were unsure who to believe - Sam or the former management team. There were accusations on both sides but no “smoking gun.”

• With reduced funding, Sam had less capital to trade with but could still operate.

• With no one left to argue with, Sam started using his algorithm Modelbot which instantly started making large profits.

• They eventually found the $4 million in missing Ripple cryptocurrency that had caused issues previously.

• After the turmoil, those who remained trusted Sam more, even if they didn’t fully understand his actions.

• Caroline developed romantic feelings for Sam, her boss, which caused her personal issues and conflicts of interest at work. She wrote a lengthy memo to Sam outlining her perspective.

• Shortly after, Sam left for Hong Kong and informed the remaining employees he was not returning, effectively ending the company.

• The passage describes the early days of cryptocurrency and follows Zane Tackett, an early Bitcoin adopter. Tackett dropped out of college after learning about Bitcoin and moved to China to work for a cryptocurrency exchange.

• As Bitcoin grew in popularity and price, it attracted many speculators. Hundreds of new cryptocurrencies were created primarily as money grabs rather than real projects. This bothered Tackett.

• Cryptocurrency exchanges acted as both the exchange platform and custodian of users’ funds, requiring high levels of trust. However, exchanges were unregulated with no oversight. Many exchanges lost or stole users’ money through hacking or insider theft.

• In 2016, the exchange Tackett worked for, Bitfinex, lost over $70 million worth of Bitcoin to hackers, demonstrating the lack of security and risk of trusting exchanges in the nascent cryptocurrency industry.

• Zane worked in cryptocurrency trading after an earlier firm he worked for, Bitfinex, lost $4.6 billion worth of bitcoin. This caused him to receive death threats and suicide notes from angry customers.

• He then found safer work doing over-the-counter crypto trading. This went well until late 2018 when one trader suddenly tightened spreads and established himself as the main market maker. Others identified this trader as Sam Bankman-Fried, a vegan who wanted to give money to charity.

• Curious about Sam’s new crypto exchange proposal, Zane wanted to work for him.

• Sam co-founded Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm. In late 2018, he publicly identified himself for the first time at a crypto conference in Macau. This had significant effects, like getting frozen funds returned from an exchange.

• Sam’s civil war with some effective altruists left him questioning himself. He took an evenhanded approach in analyzing what happened but recognized the damage done.

• Alameda remained profitable after the dispute. Sam saw this as vindicating his approach but recognized he needs to do better explaining himself to others. He worked on documentation to help current/future employees understand how to work with him.

• The person (likely Sam Bankman-Fried) was frustrated by criticism of his management style and not seeing value in management techniques. He decided the best approach was to be less off-putting and give a positive impression to others, even if he privately disagreed.

• In 2018, his crypto trading firm Alameda Research generated $30M in profits but after expenses, taxes, and paying investors, they were only able to donate $1.5M to charity. This wasn’t enough to meet their goals.

• He pitched the idea of an advanced crypto exchange to Binance CEO CZ, but CZ decided not to partner and instead built their own exchange. This motivated Sam to create an exchange himself, though he had doubts due to lack of experience with marketing, customers, etc. He began recruiting others to help. The goal was building the first professional crypto futures exchange to better serve big traders and generate more profits for charity donations.

• Ryan Salame was a freedom-loving Republican who had worked as a tax accountant but found more fun working in crypto trading at Circle.

• When Sam approached him about working for a new crypto exchange called FTX, Ryan saw potential opportunities to make social connections in crypto on Sam’s behalf, as Sam lacked typical crypto social skills.

• After meeting Sam, Ryan realized Sam was different from others in crypto - more focused on the work than socializing. But Sam needed people like Ryan to establish trust.

• Sam lacked friends or connections to venture capitalists, but he had created a token called FTT that would entitle holders to a share of FTX exchange revenues.

• Sam offered FTT to employees, crypto insiders like CZ, and later the public, and it was a success, raising money for FTX and making early buyers wealthy.

• With money from the FTT sale, FTX grew rapidly in Hong Kong, hiring inexperienced people who were ambitious to work in crypto, as Sam focused on building an innovative crypto exchange.

• Ramnik Arora was looking for a more fulfilling job that didn’t require a long commute from Berkeley to Facebook in Menlo Park.

• He saw an ad on LinkedIn for Alameda Research and was put in touch with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

• Despite a major pay cut, Ramnik was drawn to Sam’s passion and took a job at FTX, though his exact role was unclear at first.

• He initially struggled to find purpose but took on various ad hoc responsibilities, especially around building trust and legitimacy for the growing but still opaque company.

• Ramnik helped talk Sam out of listing tokens for a Taiwanese porn company, recognizing the need to appear respectable to outsiders.

• He worked to set up relationships with reputable venture capitalists and get Sam media exposure to raise the profile and credibility of FTX outside of crypto circles.

• One of Ramnik’s main focuses was helping FTX navigate unclear regulations around crypto licensing and oversight from different regulatory bodies.

• Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are regulated differently in the US depending on whether they are classified as a commodity or security. Bitcoin is regulated by the CFTC as a commodity.

• In early 2021, the SEC and CFTC were just starting to regulate cryptocurrencies but had not established clear rules. This created legal uncertainty for crypto businesses.

• FTX raised billions in funding from venture capital firms by pitching its fast growth and ambition to become a regulated US crypto exchange, challenging traditional exchanges.

• Sam Bankman-Fried owned both the crypto exchange FTX and the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. There was blurring between the two entities in terms of financing, management and operations.

• Sam handed leadership of Alameda to co-CEOs Sam Trabucco and Caroline Ellison while he focused on promoting FTX. But the relationship between Sam and Caroline became complicated.

Here is a summary of the arguments against dating or entering into a relationship presented:

• The person feels they lack empathy, feelings, and facial expressions are not genuine, so they can’t truly make someone happy in a relationship.

• They have a history of getting bored and feeling claustrophobic in relationships, which could be an issue.

• They feel conflicted about what they want - sometimes wanting to be with the other person, sometimes wanting to work alone for long hours without distractions.

• There are potential power dynamics and employment issues since the other person is an employee.

• It could damage the reputation and public relations of the company/organization they work for if the relationship goes poorly.

• It combines badly with other work issues they are responsible for adjudicating.

• They feel they make people sad even when inspiring them, and dating is difficult because they can’t make the other person happy, don’t respect others, think offensive thoughts, don’t have time, and want alone time frequently.

• There are ethical issues with dating an employee given power dynamics and conflicts of interest.

The potential positive arguments in favor were much briefer and centered around chemistry, shared interests, appreciation, and attraction between the two people.

• The crypto people started showing up to therapy in 2017 during the crypto boom. There were two main types - libertarians who didn’t fit in companies due to their anti-government views, and younger people primarily interested in making money.

• Effective altruists (EAs) started showing up around 2018. George found them fascinating because they took a logical, utilitarian approach to life decisions like having children. Caroline Ellison was one of the early EA clients and focused most sessions on her unreciprocated love for Sam Bankman-Fried.

• Sam Bankman-Fried became a client in 2019 and wanted a therapist who would simply accept him as he was without judgment. He saw George as useful for advising on business matters rather than dealing with emotions.

• After moving to the Bahamas, Sam suggested George move there too to serve as corporate psychiatrist to FTX, indicating his view of therapy as a practical rather than emotional issue. Caroline continued struggling with her feelings for Sam not being returned.

• Sam felt uncomfortable about publicly revealing his relationship with e due to worries about perceived bias, bad PR, and making others uncomfortable at work.

• There were multiple factors influencing Sam’s decision to move from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, not just the relationship issue. These included quarantine restrictions, risk of Chinese government arresting crypto exchange heads, lawyers warning about legal risks in China, and plans for Sam and Gary to escape if arrested.

• Sam had concerns about how the relationship was impacting e, such as fear of judgment influencing her and the desire to impress him. He apologized for being a “shitty person to date.”

• By mid-2021, Sam was looking for a new location for FTX after leaving Hong Kong. Many places were ruled out for various regulatory or practical reasons. The Bahamas emerged as a good option due to its crypto-friendly laws, infrastructure, tax system, and the prime minister wanting to attract business.

• At this time, Sam/Alameda’s financial position was very strong due to returns on loans and investments in projects like Solana that greatly increased in value. FTX was also growing rapidly. Sam was considering a major funding round that could value him as the richest person in the world.

• CZ, the CEO of Binance, had settled in Dubai which has no extradition treaty with the US, useful given Binance’s tendency to ignore regulations.

• Binance had grown tremendously in two years by offering financial products banned or not approved by local regulators, who lacked resources to take action.

• Binance’s exchange token BNB, like FTX’s FTT, was essentially selling unregulated securities to US investors despite not meeting any definition besides being a security.

• Crypto exchanges ranged from only listing bitcoin/ether, to listing newer coins without obvious security properties like FTX, to Coinbase listing hundreds including some viewed as securities, to Binance brazenly selling its own unregulated security BNB to US investors.

• Relations between Binance and FTX deteriorated as they saw each other as rivals, with Binance engaging in wash trading schemes that FTX was able to profit from using smarter bots.

• CZ seemed obsessed with FTX as the only real threat to Binance’s position, despite being an investor, showing Binance’s unsustainable strategy made regulators the key to overtaking them.

The largest shareholder of FTX after Sam was CZ, the founder of Binance. In mid-2021, Sam bought out CZ’s stake in FTX for $2.275 billion, consisting of $2.2 billion for the shares CZ had paid $80 million for originally, plus an additional $75 million CZ insisted on at the last minute. This buyout occurred as Sam was facing more regulatory scrutiny and could not have both CZ as a major investor and also get on regulators’ good side. It created a “cold war” between Sam and CZ going forward.

• Ian and Alfia were hired as architects to design a mini-city headquarters for crypto exchange FTX in the Bahamas. They were given little guidance and had to observe FTX employees to understand the company’s structure and needs.

• Sam, the founder, was not helpful and largely delegated everything. The architects struggled to get basic information like employee headcount.

• They observed the workaholic culture where many lived in the office. Needs included ample power outlets, good shades, shower/sleep spaces, and big common areas.

• They eventually got a list of 3 things Sam supposedly wanted - a building shaped like an F, siding to evoke his “Jewfro”, and a display of a $250k 14” tungsten cube.

• However, they realized Sam was not actually involved and knew nothing of their design plans. When they pulled him aside before a groundbreaking, he had not seen any designs.

• Sam seemed unchanged from high school and just “winged it” during his speech, changing the topic rather than discuss the mini-city plans he knew nothing about.

• Ian, an architect working for Sam, had designed buildings for FTX around ideas like putting Sam’s “Jewfro” on the side of a building or shipping in a one-ton tungsten cube, though these ideas were not serious.

• At an event, Ian finally asked Sam directly what he wanted from the buildings aside from work. Sam said badminton courts, and specified he wanted three courts.

• George Lerner worked as a “Senior Professional Coach” to listen to employees’ problems, as the Bahamas did not grant him a medical license. Many employees were unhappy with lack of dating opportunities, unclear management structure, and inability to communicate with Sam directly.

• George drew up an org chart and discovered around 24 people thought they reported directly to Sam, and the structure was disorganized compared to a normal company.

• Sam’s relationship with Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda Research, was failing. They broke up but hid this and that Sam moved homes to keep up appearances. This was right before crypto prices crashed.

So in summary, it outlines some of the disorganized structure and management issues at FTX from the perspectives of Ian the architect and George Lerner, as well as Sam’s breakup with Caroline Ellison.

• Sam Bankman-Fried was considering helping to fund Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter. Igor Kurganov, an advisor to Musk, reached out to Sam about bringing on additional investors to help finance the deal.

• Sam wanted to discuss the idea with Ramnik and Nishad. In a makeshift meeting, he explained that partnering with Musk could help promote crypto on Twitter and give them influence over the platform. Musk was also signaling openness to effective altruism causes through Kurganov.

• Sam was thinking they could invest $1 billion or as low as $250 million on top of the $100 million in Twitter stock they already owned. Ramnik seemed uneasy but didn’t object outright.

• Nishad asked how involved they could actually get with Musk and whether it would lead to meaningful opportunities for effective altruism. Sam acknowledged Musk is “a weird dude” but didn’t provide definitive answers to Nishad’s questions.

• Sam was meeting with Nishad and Ramnik to discuss Elon Musk’s request for funding to purchase Twitter. Sam believed investing would raise FTX’s profile.

• Nishad was skeptical and Ramnik was harder to read. They voted no on investing a large sum, though Sam might still ignore them.

• Sam makes many sporadic investment decisions without consulting others. He invests billions rapidly in a wide range of companies and crypto projects.

• Others like Ramnik worry Sam is too trusting of strangers and doesn’t have proper oversight. Sam doesn’t see the need for roles like a CFO or taking regulatory issues seriously.

• Sam tires of “grown-ups” who focus on risks without identifying real problems and slow him down. He makes decisions quickly based on probabilities.

• The story concludes with Sam meeting the author before meeting Mitch McConnell, but he had only brought a wrinkled suit without other necessary clothing items.

• Sam Bankman-Fried carries a suit with him only when traveling to Washington DC because the political stakes there justify the sacrifice of bringing formal wear.

• Sam is surprised that despite huge sums of money now allowed in politics, wealthy individuals and corporations have not adapted much. He thinks not enough money is being spent to influence policy.

• Sam secretly funnels huge sums of money into US politics through opaque channels to pursue causes like pandemic prevention, in part by backing political candidates supportive of related issues and trying to get them elected.

• One example candidate Sam backed was Carrick Flynn, a pandemic policy wonk who ran for Congress. Flynn was a long shot candidate but Sam gave him substantial financial support without Flynn fully realizing it at first.

• Sam’s political spending is aimed at both lobbying elected officials directly and putting supportive candidates into office, though he tries to hide the fact that the money comes from crypto to avoid negative associations. His goals are partly to help his own business but mainly to further causes like pandemic preparedness that he thinks are underfunded.

Sam spent tens of millions unsuccessfully trying to get Carrick Flynn elected to Congress in Oregon. Flynn’s campaign was overwhelmed by negative ads from rivals funded by Sam. Voters realized Sam was trying to buy the election and turned against Flynn. Flynn acted erratically and finished second in the primary.

Sam saw value in working with Mitch McConnell to influence Senate primaries. He planned to give $15-30 million to defeat more extreme pro-Trump candidates. Sam also explored paying Trump $5 billion not to run in 2024. As a tactic, Sam seeded the idea of Trump ambiguously endorsing “Eric” in a Missouri Senate race to boost Trump’s attention.

Effective altruists including Sam, Gary, Nishad and Caroline gathered at Albany resort in the Bahamas to discuss effective giving. They lived luxuriously in the penthouse of the Orchid building but filled it with computers, games and other items, turning the $30 million condo into a flophouse. In summary, Sam pursued political influence through vast spending but met challenges, while living lavishly with other EAs who did not focus strongly on luxury.

• The passage describes a meeting between members of FTX’s philanthropic and business divisions. They discuss distributing large sums of money (potentially billions) to reduce existential risks to humanity like pandemics, asteroids, and advanced artificial intelligence.

• Effective altruism has shifted its focus from saving current lives to reducing risks to future humanity. They see existential risks like AI as having a potentially huge expected value due to their ability to wipe out all future people.

• They have started giving experts in relevant fields (pandemics, AI) $1 million each to distribute as they see fit, to cut out bureaucratic inefficiencies. They will track the results to see who deserves more funding.

• Sam sees themselves playing a game to generate hundreds of billions and use it to reduce existential risks within the next 10-15 years, as he doubts the value of life after age 40. The group is moving very fast due to this urgency.

• As of late October 2022, not even a few weeks later, the plans are about to completely change due to unfolding events at FTX that will soon come to light.

• Stablecoins on platforms like FTX were supposed to have dollars held in insured bank accounts backing them 1:1, but there was no proof the dollars were actually there. The whole crypto system relied on a huge amount of trust.

• By late October 2022, that trust collapsed as major crypto players like Three Arrows Capital failed and crypto banks suffered runs and collapsed, unlike the 2008 financial crisis where governments stepped in.

• Crypto now relied on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, to evaluate which failing crypto businesses to save and which to let die. Trust now shifted to SBF.

• SBF’s right-hand man Ramnik Agrawal was putting the finishing touches on acquiring failed crypto banks Voyager Digital and BlockFi for around $200 million total, a fraction of their previous $7 billion valuation.

• By early November, at least $8 billion belonging to crypto traders on FTX was missing, having ended up inside SBF’s Alameda Research hedge fund instead of being safe as promised. FTX filed for bankruptcy and its employees, including Ramnik, fled the Bahamas.

• SBF was found abandoned at the now-empty FTX offices, in need of a ride, as the crypto empire he built rapidly collapsed due to lost trust and missing user funds.

• CZ, the CEO of Binance, tweeted questioning the financial health of FTX, sparking withdrawals. Within a week, $5 billion was withdrawn from FTX as customers tried to pull their money out.

• Caroline, Sam’s partner, tried to reassure CZ by offering to buy back his FTX tokens (FTT) for $22 each, but this backfired and the price fell. Analysis suggested they were trying to prop up the price.

• It became clear FTX did not have enough assets to repay all customers. They claimed to have $15 billion in deposits previously but only $10 billion remained after withdrawals. Their remaining assets like real estate and investments would be hard to liquidate quickly.

• Sam, Caroline and others scrambled to find $7 billion to fill what they thought was a funding hole, but couldn’t explain why it existed. Lawyers and advisors called investors but it was difficult to raise money without more transparency on the issue.

• The piece questions whether FTX truly didn’t know the risks and full financial situation, or if they were unprepared despite possible warnings of issues. It remains unclear exactly what happened to the missing customer funds.

• FTX filed for bankruptcy after a liquidity crisis where customer deposits disappeared. CZ of Binance was initially willing to acquire FTX but backed out after inspecting their books.

• Key FTX figures like Nishad, Caroline, Can, Ramnik felt urgent to leave due to legal risks and threats. Caroline told Hong Kong employees that Alameda had losses in June and borrowed from FTX, leaving both now bankrupt.

• Nishad expressed worry about criminal culpability and wanted Sam to take blame. Sam said he didn’t have reason to think anyone intended crimes.

• The Bahamas regulator Christina Rolle intervened, freezing FTX assets and questioning Sam and others to understand what happened before making arrests. Rumors blamed Sam for theft but Rolle didn’t think that was clear.

• By the end of the week, most key figures had fled, $450M in crypto was stolen from FTX wallets, and Sam remained in the Bahamas meeting with regulators and facing an uncertain legal situation.

• By Friday night after the FTX collapse, only two people remained at the Albany resort in the Bahamas where many FTX employees had been staying - Zane Tackett and Gary Wang.

• Zane had been a staunch defender of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX up until everything unraveled. He was in disbelief about what happened and trying to process it all while packing up his things.

• Gary Wang, the CEO of Alameda Research, finally spoke briefly to Sam to say he was leaving on his lawyer’s advice before quietly slipping away without another word to anyone. His lawyer helped smuggle him back to the US before Bahamian authorities knew he had left.

• Otherwise the luxury resort was eerily empty, though full of leftover possessions and supplies since people had fled so quickly. Only a few like Sam’s parents and psychiatrist stayed behind with him as he dealt with the bankruptcy proceedings.

• By Monday, the only other signs of life were from Ryan Salame’s house nearby where he and others had been staying. Zane and Gary were the last two employees remaining at the resort as everyone scrambled to understand what happened and deal with the fallout.

• Constance Wang, the COO of FTX, stayed in the Bahamas after the collapse to help obtain travel permits for her two cats, Lucky and Money, to bring them back to China. Her friend Quinn Li also stayed to help her.

• Constance wanted to understand what happened to cause FTX’s collapse. She was perplexed and felt a need to figure things out.

• Sam Bankman-Fried still hoped to revive FTX with help from crypto billionaire Justin Sun. Constance didn’t think much of Sun’s plan but stayed partly to make sure Sam didn’t harm himself.

• Constance unearthed internal documents showing FTX’s huge marketing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. She was surprised by the amounts spent.

• She also found an Alameda balance sheet showing over $10 billion of customer funds had ended up in Sam’s trading fund, when FTX only had $3 billion in liquid assets. This revealed the source of the issues.

• A document listed FTX’s top 50 creditors who lost billions, including many high frequency trading firms. Constance herself lost around $25 million.

So in summary, Constance stayed to help her cats, understand what happened to FTX, and ensure Sam’s well-being, while also investigating through internal documents she uncovered.

• Constance was the head of translation at FTX and helped uncover what happened with user funds.

• Many traders at FTX were suspicious of the relationship between FTX and Alameda Research, Sam’s hedge fund, wondering if Alameda had unfair trading advantages.

• It was revealed that FTX had loaned all user deposits to Alameda interest-free, and had exempted Alameda from risk rules that applied to other traders. This put users’ funds at risk.

• Constance was shocked to discover she owned far less of FTX than she thought based on her bonuses and shares. This is when she lost trust in Sam.

• Sam claimed user funds held by Alameda in an “fiat@” account were simply never moved after FTX lacked bank accounts in 2019, and he didn’t realize the full risk. But this constituted the majority of missing user funds.

• Sam’s explanations failed to adequately account for the misuse of user deposits and lack of risk controls that contributed to FTX’s collapse. Constance aimed to get more answers from him.

• In June, Caroline discovered that FTX’s fiat account was showing $16 billion instead of the actual $8.8 billion. Gary discovered it was a software bug.

• In September, Caroline grew worried about Alameda’s market exposure. She relayed this to Nishad, who told Sam, but without explicitly mentioning the fiat account.

• By October, Sam had dug into the accounts and realized Alameda had been operating as if the $8.8 billion in customer funds belonged to it, but it was too late to do anything.

• Constance didn’t believe Sam’s story, thinking he must have omitted a trading loss or consciously decided to take customer funds. She tried finding evidence but couldn’t prove anything.

• Constance learned Sam has “absolutely zero empathy” and “can’t feel anything” about the harm caused to loyal employees who lost their savings.

• A crude financial statement showed around $9 billion more entered Sam’s World (FTX and Alameda) than exited it. Around $6 billion was unaccounted for after FTX collapsed.

• Potential explanations like trading losses were not very persuasive given Alameda’s claims of profitability. The crypto crash didn’t fully explain where the hard dollars went.

• The Orchid penthouse apartments remained untouched after the collapse of FTX, preserving the occupants’ states of mind. Caroline’s room was messy like she left on vacation, Nishad’s was clean like a hotel room.

• Gary’s room, where Sam moved, told a complicated story. He appeared to partially pack then change his mind multiple times, staying a few more days each time before abruptly leaving.

• Sam paid Kevin O’Leary $15 million over 3 years for endorsements on social media. He viewed it as a worthwhile investment due to O’Leary’s large Twitter following in the financial space.

• FTX lost over $1 billion to hackers in large attacks in March-April 2021. A lone trader profited off a flaw in FTX’s system by manipulating prices of thinly traded tokens.

• The full amount of missing $6 billion from FTX remains unaccounted for. Sam was unhelpful or unwilling to explain where it went.

• Police arrested Sam at the Orchid penthouse as he was sending congressional testimony about the FTX collapse. His family searched for things he might need in jail while he was taken away in handcuffs.

• John Ray is a veteran bankruptcy lawyer who was unexpectedly hired to take over as CEO of FTX after it filed for bankruptcy. He knew nothing about crypto or FTX beforehand.

• Ray viewed Sam Bankman-Fried with suspicion after looking at his photo and refused to communicate with him directly. He categorized Sam as a “crook” rather than a “good guy” or “naive guy.”

• Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two of Sam’s top lieutenants, were also viewed skeptically by Ray. Caroline was evasive about her location while speaking to Ray.

• When Ray took over, he found FTX’s finances and operations to be disorganized and chaotic with no clear sense of where funds were held across various exchanges and bank accounts globally. There was no employee list or clear organizational structure.

• Ray’s goals were to recover as many funds as possible for creditors through the bankruptcy process and to assist US authorities in investigating Sam and FTX for any criminal wrongdoing.

• John Ray was hired as the new CEO of FTX six days after it collapsed into bankruptcy. He described the financial situation as a complete failure of corporate controls and lack of trustworthy information.

• Ray hired investigation teams including former FBI agents to interview all FTX employees. Around 80 employees were immediately fired for not scheduling interviews. Most other employees were also fired after their interviews.

• Ray fired almost all employees who had deep knowledge of what happened at FTX and Alameda Research in order to investigate without their influence. The only exception was keeping the psychiatrist on payroll.

• Through ongoing investigations, Ray’s team uncovered hundreds of millions in crypto hacks from previous years that Sam Bankman-Fried had not disclosed. They were also finding missing funds and loans that were not recorded.

• Ray saw the situation as an “Easter egg hunt” to track down all the company’s assets, while I compared it to an archaeologist digging but not fully understanding the past civilization. Ray focused on finding evidence of wrongdoing while I knew the full context of some situations.

• After months, Ray’s team concluded FTX still owed customers $8.6 billion. Options to repay included continued investigations, selling remaining assets, and clawing back funds from those who received investments and donations from Sam.

• Ray, the bankruptcy trustee for FTX, was trying to claw back money from various people and entities that Sam Bankman-Fried had given money to while he was running FTX.

• Simply getting paid for services rendered, like a plumber, would not be enough for Ray to claw the money back. He had to prove that at the time the money was given, FTX was insolvent or nearly insolvent, so Sam didn’t actually have the authority to give that money away.

• One of Ray’s biggest targets was Dan Friedberg, the general counsel for FTX. Friedberg had been granted over 100 million Serum tokens by FTX as part of his compensation. Serum was a cryptocurrency created by the Solana Foundation.

• Ray viewed Serum and other “cryptocurrencies” created by Sam more skeptically than actual business operations like FTX that generated real cash flow. Serum had relatively little usage and its value was uncertain.

• Ray was suing Friedberg to claw back the value of the Serum tokens he had been granted, which Ray estimated was over $33 million at the time of FTX’s bankruptcy based on Serum’s market price. However, Friedberg was not able to freely sell the tokens due to vesting restrictions imposed by Sam.

• Soon after Serum’s creation, its price skyrocketed unexpectedly. Sam had not anticipated this and now his employees felt rich in theory from their Serum holdings.

• However, Sam was concerned employees would be less motivated to work long hours. So he used a clause in employees’ contracts to lock up their Serum for 7 years, changing the terms.

• This upset employees like Ramnik who felt the value of their Serum was unclear given Sam could change the rules. It also meant Dan Friedberg likely couldn’t have actually sold his large Serum holdings at the stated peak market price.

• However, John Ray’s report now treated the locked Serum as still having significant value. If this were true, it would mean FTX was solvent up until collapse and Ray couldn’t claw back money.

• So far Ray has recovered about $7 billion in liquid assets from FTX, with potential for more. But many questions remain about where the missing money went and Sam’s full intentions and actions.

The passage suggests it is easier for people to give in to societal pressures and cave to popular opinion than it is for them to stay true to their own identities.

As context, the passage describes Sam Bankman-Fried sitting alone in his childhood home, where he has returned after the collapse of FTX. He is under house arrest with an ankle monitor. His parents have hired a large guard dog named Sandor that was trained in Germany to kill on command in German. Though the dog is meant to protect Sam, he takes no interest in it.

The passage implies it would be very “Sam Bankman-Fried” for him to meet his end by being eaten by his own guard dog, in a terrible misunderstanding, given his pattern of misunderstandings with others. This reflects how much easier it is for people to give up who they are and succumb to outside forces, rather than preserve their true selves.