Some Guys Have All The Luck
A review of “Going Infinite” by Michael Lewis
In the words of the old song, “Some Guys have all the Luck”, and Michael Lewis seems to be one of those guys. He was shadowing an ignoble Icarus, the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), writing his biography, just when SBF’s empire loudly imploded, leading to one of the most remarkable trials in history.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time! The song, if you are interested is on the link below, sung by Rod Stewart, another guy who had his share of luck -
However, not to detract from Michael Lewis. He is one of my favourite authors of all time. I have read his books “Liar’s Poker”, “Flash Boys”, and “The Big Short”, and love his ability to draw pen portraits of people so brilliantly, that you feel you are being introduced to some of his really interesting friends in a country club bar room.
Lewis is ideally placed to write about the world of finance, since he had a very successful career as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman in the 1980s, before he jumped ship to become a writer, a very risky move one might say, given the impecunious state of most of us writers on Medium.
However, for Lewis, it paid off big-time, and I read in a Guardian review of this book that the magazine “Vanity Fair” used to pay him $10 a word. Please pause reading while I go and lie down and cry in a dark room for half an hour.
Anyway, this review of “Going Infinite” follows a very unfavourable one I wrote of “Technofeudalism” by Yanis Veroufakis which failed to live up to expectations.:
Fortunately, “Going Infinite” is at the other end of the scale, a book which I was both looking forward to, and also exceeded expectations.
The story of SBF is an extraordinary one, which Lewis tells with his usual brilliant style. With his financial background he is one of the few people who actually understands the world of arbitrage, shorting, high-frequency trading and the like, so is ideally placed to dig deeper into the story, and try and discover whether savant SBF was potentially one of the world’s greatest effective altruists, a mendacious maven, or perhaps a bit of both.
I won’t comment too much on this, since the matter is currently sub judice, and SBF is banged up in the clink, which for someone like him, with a brain the size of America’s national debt, and the attention span of a TikiTok-addicted gnat on amphetamines, must be a complete nightmare.
Lewis seems to have an access-all-areas pass to SBF’s life, including bizarre love notes he and his partner sent to each other, in the form of bullet-pointed memos, listing the pros and cons of their relationship, as if weighing up an investment opportunity!
SBF comes across as an extraordinary character, clearly on the autistic spectrum, very gifted, troubled by depression and ill at ease socially: he learned to fake facial expressions to be able to connect with mainstream society.
He was a child prodigy at puzzles and mathematics. He also appears one of those people able to multi-task phenomenally well. From a different sphere of life, I always thought the same of Jerry Lee Lewis, the boogie-woogie piano player, who could somehow simultaneously keep separate time with two hands on the piano, sing, and ham it up for the adoring crowd and cameras. I have enough trouble just walking in a straight line.
SBF was frequently in online meetings with important people, but would be simultaneously playing video games in the background, throwing the occasional “Yup” to confirm that he was still in theory present (in fact he was probably ten steps ahead of those he was seemingly ignoring, in a way that most people would regard as incredibly rude).
The book is an almost perfect alignment for a best seller — an author at the top of his game writing about crypto, crime and obscene amounts of wonga. Thoroughly recommended: I can’t wait for the film.
As always, thank you for reading.
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