Easy Money by McKenzie Ben;Silverman Jacob;

Author:McKenzie, Ben;Silverman, Jacob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams, Inc.
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE EMPEROR IS BUTT-ASS NAKED

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” —Hunter S. Thompson

I don’t spend much time around billionaires. I’ve met a few in passing at fancy showbiz events over the years, but I never talked to any of them for more than a minute. Billionaires are always very busy and must be spared the burden of talking to non-billionaires whenever possible. I certainly never interviewed one on camera before. Most of my journalism experience had been on the other side of things, the subject of entertainment industry puffery.

Afraid of fucking up what might be my only chance at a sit-down with the public face of crypto, I needed a cram session on all things Sam Bankman-Fried. If the industry was the functional equivalent of an unregulated, unlicensed casino, as I strongly suspected it to be, it was highly improbable that the guy running one of the biggest casinos was completely on the up and up. But suspicions are not facts, and I was on the hunt for clues to fraud.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of information to be gleaned due to the fawning press coverage Sam had received. He had graced the cover of Forbes and would soon do the same at Fortune, with the latter subtly wondering if he was “THE NEXT WARREN BUFFETT?” The Wall Street Journal said he was gonna spend a billion to bail out crypto, Bloomberg and others breathlessly reported on his (undefined) plans to give away his enormous fortune. Sam floated the idea of spending a billion on the 2024 election cycle, “north of $100 million.” He was everywhere: on TV, in print, and seemingly online 24-7. I dug in.

Sam Bankman-Fried was the child of Stanford law professors—an intellectual pedigree that later added to his nerd-king mystique. Growing up, he and his younger brother, Gabe, were engrossed with the card game Magic: The Gathering, as well as video games like League of Legends and StarCraft. Sam, who has ADD, was infamous for playing multiple games at once. He said he quickly grew bored with a single opponent; he needed more of a challenge. Ironically, Sam’s public ranking in League of Legends was rather middling, an indication that the future CEO might have overestimated his own prowess.

Sam excelled when it came to quantitative reasoning, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 with a major in physics and a minor in math. While at MIT, Sam had a life-changing encounter with Will MacAskill, a proponent of a philosophical craze sweeping through Silicon Valley called effective altruism (EA). Conceptually, EA is straightforward: If you want to do the most good for the most people, you should strive to make the most money possible in order to give it all away. Philosophically, EA is predicated on utilitarianism, the doctrine that actions are right if they provide the most usefulness (utility) and benefit to the majority.

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