Roblog

I wrote last week about Sam Bankman-Fried and the corruption of noble causes. The LRB just published this tour de force from John Lanchester, reviewing both Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite and Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up. Lanchester is, it’s safe to say, no fan of SBF:

“Going Infinite is wildly entertaining, surprising multiple times on pretty much every page, but it adds up to a sad story, even a tragedy, for its central character and for all the people who lost so much thanks to his actions. Lewis, whom I know, is charming and amenable to charm; he likes SBF and is amused by him. I don’t feel the same, mainly because SBF, as well as being reckless with things that don’t belong to him, and deeply arrogant about his own intellectual superiority, is unredeemably careless about people. ‘The notion that other people don’t matter as much as I do felt like a stretch,’ he once said. A worthy insight, but SBF doesn’t act on it: in Going Infinite he repeatedly, compulsively, acts as if other people don’t matter at all. He plays video games during meetings and conversations, fails to be where he’s said he’ll be and do what he’s said he’ll do, and in general does exactly whatever he feels like doing, all the time. A detail: ‘I watched as Sam entered the empty townhouse, opened a closet, and, without so much as a glance at the row of empty hangers, tossed the ball of clothes onto the closet floor. We then drove together to the airport and returned to the Bahamas.’ The person whose job it will be to pick up those clothes, as far as SBF is concerned, does not exist.”

…and yet, by the end, he feels oddly sorry for him as he stares down the barrel of decades in prison. I felt exactly the same when reading Going Infinite.