Here's a better journo calling out Lewis' shameless SBF peepeeriding
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-going-infinite-book-michael-lewis/675609
Archived in case of paywall:
https://archive.is/v38jt
!r-slurs and !bookworms I'll tag both because this book is bad enough to get ridiculed by both.
Choice Lewis Apologia
>Sam dindu nuffin!! He was just a wittle boy who was just misunderstood. All the evil Wall St bros just didn't let him win.
>They didn't have any polycule you guys. They just lived in close quarters.
>If FTX's assets were properly assessed, we would all find the missing amounts. I don't think any of them would ever lie.
>SBFs parents are just big mama and papa taking care of their wittle boy
>SBF is a super savant bro. You just don't get it. He fidgets with board games and plays Vidya during press conferences, wears cargo shorts and flip flops and wears a wrinkly suit when he meets big DC people. He's so humble!!
>When asked whether he'll go to Vegas, he says 60%. OMG! Did you see the nuance? He just sees the world in an absolute quantifiable way!! Woah!!
>"I don't feel anything. Emotions are a hindrance." Woah Sam is so intelligent. (I wonder how emotionless he would be if I broke his arm)
>Effective Altruism totally works bro. You just don't get it. Consider a doctor in Zambia working against malaria. He can only spend 10 months there because he has family to feed. Let's say there are 50 doctors like him. So in total they can spend 500 hours to fight malaria in Zambia. However if I become an billionaire by defrauding investors I can hire doctors who can spend 501 hour there. Therefore it is ethical for me to become a billionaire. Lewis says, no cap, it sounds good in theory.
Fricking BIPOC.
And many more.
Worst book of 2023 by far.
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I was so disappointed about this because I was really hoping for a Liar's Poker style blow-the-doors off exposé. Like goddarn, imagine if Lewis had gained SBF's trust promising to write a peepeesucking hagiography, and then he'd turned around and shanked him good and hard. No subjects would ever trust Lewis again, but for real the dude is not getting any younger. This could have been a career- and era-defining hitpiece of a book.
What a goddarned waste.
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Gotta respect sitting to his guns tho, the popular path was so very obvious but he refused to buckle
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Didn't he start writing it before the blow up and was just like frick it I already drank the koolaid and like the kid, and I don't get this crypto stuff but it sounds exciting and already wrote half the book so why virtue signal now
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I've only listened to interviews but I think he reckons he already has enough stuff to convey that SBF took silly risks and didn't care about compliance, he just couldn't be arsed to rewrite the book with a moral valence
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I respect that
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Yeah that is what happened. Hes still dumb af for buying into him tho
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Well, I already wrote 350 pages about a bold iconoclastic genius changing the world, and editing and rewrites are annoying.
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SBF was clearly willing to talk to anyone and everyone about every little thing he could and it was obvious he was lying about everything.
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I saw that piece of shit movie Find Big Shorty which I guess was based on his book and no wonder he got it all wrong that movie stunk. Placed on the blame on the cartoonishly evil stock Wall St characters instead of the real people to blame which is the poor
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