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Going Infinite

The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

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Going Infinite

By: Michael Lewis
Narrated by: Michael Lewis
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'I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. "One hundred and fifty billion dollars," he finally said-though he added that he had use for "infinity dollars"...'

Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just rich. Before he turned thirty he'd become the world's youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.

Then it all fell apart.

Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?

Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted 'thinking machine', and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.

©2023 Michael Lewis (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Business International Political Science Politics & Government Professionals & Academics Money Stock Capitalism
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Critic reviews

Going Infinite is insanely readable and I devoured it, marvelling at Lewis’s ability to pace, structure and humanise a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto… As with previous outings such as Moneyball (nerdy baseball stats), The Big Short (credit default swaps), and Flash Boys (high-frequency trading), Going Infinite shows off Lewis’s peculiar genius for making arcane information as transporting as fantasy fiction.
Going Infinite is a stupefyingly pleasurable book to read. It’s perfectly paced, extremely funny, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting... What he began with Moneyball has come into full flower with Going Infinite. Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized, at least here and there, by uneven and unreliable information. Perhaps Lewis’s book should encourage an update, however minuscule, in our own priors.
Going Infinite is a portrait of grandiose ambitions, youthful arrogance, and the distorting power of money... [Lewis] remains the greatest living exponent of the plain style in reporting. His eye for detail is unsurpassed... And as a chronicle of collective delusion - a modern version of the Dutch tulip mania - Going Infinite is an instant classic... Michael Lewis deserves huge credit for capturing [SBF] in all his infinite weirdness... Mark Zuckerberg, another boy genius in ratty shoes, once described Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Sam Bankman-Fried was a Seth Rogen character who fell into a tulip field circa 1634. Another one will be along in a minute. We never learn.
Going Infinite is in many ways Lewis at his best. He marshals a complex global story without losing sight of the delightful and revealing human details. He is a world-class noticer … Lewis is a generous writer with a humane intelligence, and it is to his credit that he doesn’t reach for easy cynicism or cheap effects. (Jesse Armstrong)
Lewis’ storytelling is as good as ever… In the past, Mr Lewis has focused on little-known people doing extraordinary things. This time his subject is notorious… Mr Bankman-Fried’s hyper-rationality sets him apart from everyone. He views people not as good or bad, but as “probability distributions” around a mean… By tolerating the idea that hyper-rationalists cannot make sense of the rules of the game the way most people do, Mr Lewis implicitly asks readers to reconsider whatever they thought they knew about Mr Bankman-Fried. In the court of public opinion, he is already convicted. That’s reason enough to give this book a read.
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I think the whole SBF story is so tragic and of our times. Michael captured the story beautifully.

Love Michael Lewis

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This is why you should have waited until after the trial before publishing, my friend.

A lot of people were taken in by SBF, none moreso than the author

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The information and depth of detail as the author takes you into the inner mind of a flawed genius is amazing.

Takes you on a ride.

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This is a beautifully written account of FTX and Sam Bankman- Fried which gives you a real insight into an extraordinary group of individuals.

You couldn’t make this story up!!!

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Michael has unfortunately taken to Sam somewhat and therefore the story is soft and sympathetic towards the main character. The book is difficult to understand fully as no one fully comprehends the spine of the story which is cryptocurrency and or and Public Blockchain. I really enjoy Michael Lewis books and movie scripts therefore I listened to the full story but the end should have included the current court case and trial and possible long sentencing. Real pity and it’s seems Michael believes in a way Sam did not do much wrong and the FTX may have actually been solvent. AK

Sympathetic story of Poor Sam

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