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Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, was in the process of writing a book about the success of FTX and SBF. He personally went to the Super Bowl with them an

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, was in the process of writing a book about the success of FTX and SBF. He personally went to the Super Bowl with them and visited them in the Bahamas multiple times. Someone on Twitter said, "he just got his perfect ending." It's gonna be a fantastic book.

par 4y ago
He should call it The Big Short 2: Get Shorted.
- indymike 4y ago
  Maybe "Coming up Short".
chinathrow 4y ago
I'll pre-order it the day it's available. The big fry.
akgerber 4y ago
Reminds me of the documentary Weiner, which was supposed to be a comeback film about Anthony Weiner's run for NYC mayor but instead became an intimate portrait of a man's life (as well as that of his unfortunate wife) utterly collapsing.
- seertaak 4y ago
  True, only that Weiner was surprisingly endearing in that documentary. Despite at the time being a staunch republican, it's hard not to like the guy, and when the fall comes you're almost rooting for him. But SBF? The last interview I saw him give was I think with Levine; it was shocking because SBF was describing whence crypto derives its value. And Levine remarked that SBF was describing a Ponzi scheme. For me, that interview showed two things. First, that SBF quite obviously has no morals whatsoever. And second, he's not nearly as smart as he's portrayed to be. His whole cred derives from his MIT degree combined with his experience at Jane Street. Jane Street is a great firm, but what they do is really specific, and not necessarily the "coolest" way to make money. It's a lot of tech and infrastructure, less finance and trading chops. (The real badasses are RenTech, for example.) Anyway, I watched a few videos that he made while working at his crypto hedge fund, Alameda. He described the strategies, and they sounded like the typical market maker stuff - arbing exchange discrepancies yadda yadda. Not the most inspired stuff.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.
    - adamisom 4y ago
      One remark I have on anti-"ends justify the means" is they always ignore the ends. The "ends" might literally be saving real people's lives, whose lives have value. I'm sure there are good arguments against the idea, but you must engage with the ends that you propose we forsake, or you're just not serious.
      - wombatpm 4y ago
        If curing cancer for the rest of humanity now and forever required knowingly experimenting on and absolutely killing a certain number of people now, how many people could you justify with an Effective-Altruism ethical framework?
        WJW 4y ago
        Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)
        imtringued 4y ago
        Longtermists simply assume we will harvest Hawking radiation for hundreds of billions of years after the heat death of the universe.
        4y ago
- nickfromseattle 4y ago
  There is also a documentary about a timeshare property mogul building the one of the biggest/most expensive personal home ever, I believe costs were over $100 million. Filming was in 2007, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the documentary devolves into watching this mogul go bankrupt. I remember a quote from the mogul, something like "I have nothing but the business. I've re-invested nearly every dollar I've ever earned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Versailles
latchkey 4y ago
It is almost as if someone has a Twitter bot... https://twitter.com/_mfrye/status/1590737441874288640 https://twitter.com/_mfrye/status/1590737441874288640
chubot 4y ago
Wow ... so I'm assuming Lewis could smell this a mile away, given his history? (Liar's Poker, etc.) It's funny that they seemingly weren't in on it -- "No it's not at all like the other things you wrote about".
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  ML wrote very favorably about IEX team in flash boys so maybe they thought it was like that
loeg 4y ago
I don't understand why anyone takes Lewis seriously after Flash Boys. He seems to just make things up from thin air.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  That book was entertaining, but so frustrating to read These big corporate traders are being paid millions to be the best at what they do (managing stock portfolios) and then it turns out they're actually awful at it and a bunch of genius math kids are running circles around them in the dark. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for the lazy, clueless, suit-wearing, trash-talking traders?
- smcin 4y ago
  Because he was superb since before then, for four decades now. I read Liar's Poker and was hooked from the first sentence. Look, Michael Lewis is like the Stephen Gaghan of (semi-fictionalized) socioeconomic zeitgeist: he chronicles concepts paradigmatic of an entire generation, people and personalities that affect or transform an entire decade or generation (usually in or about the US, and often Wall Street). And he nods towards the societal implications with a sense of urgency and inevitability but also dark theater. Sure he Hollywoodizes people and quotes, not dissimilar to how the screen adaptation of Mark Bowden's superb 'Black Hawk Down' merged characters and their story arcs, or how loosely 'War Dogs' (2016) was based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article [0] and 2015 book [1]. [As to 'War Dogs' and Lawson's writings, there's an obvious similar moral fable to three potheads from Miami Beach becoming in 2007 one of the Pentagon’s largest weapons suppliers, by reselling Chinese bullets to US-occupied Afghanistan, and noone at the Pentagon actually wanted to know where private contractors were getting their supply, as the scale of the contracts became increasingly insane.] If you want to more accurately label Lewis' genre "semi-fictionalized socioeconomic zeitgeist", then do. To be blunt, people have short attention spans, people in the US only read average 15.6 books/yr or median 4 books/yr [2], and moral ambiguity seems to sell worse than clean-cut tales casting characters as good guys and bad guys, certainly on the big screen. But these writers are still fulfilling an important service. Noone actually sits down and reads Inspector-General reports, CSPAN is occasionally great but usually dull to watch, and what now passes for US mainstream media is hopelessly coopted and long ago abandoned investigative reporting [3]. Writers like Lewis, Bowden, Lawson(, Crichton, Grisham [4]) fill a very real cultural void in interpreting what's going on. [0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers-how-two-american-kids-became-big-time-weapons-traders-176604/ https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers... [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-complete-story-of-the-300-million-stoner-arms-dealers-160311/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-comple... [2]: https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do-americans-read-per-year/ https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do... [3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar-became-the-number-one-political-podcast-in-a-week https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-wit... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995
SilasX 4y ago
Speaking of the Super Bowl, their ad aged really poorly. Someone posted a clip from it[1] that has Larry David being pitched on FTX as being a safe way to get into crypto, and he turns it down, saying he's never wrong about these things. The joke is supposed to be that he's being comically clueless to do so, because it follows a series of shorts[2] of him not "getting" the point of advancements like the wheel, the fork, the toilet, the Walkman, etc. But now he just looks wise! [1] https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136 https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136 [2] Full ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ

par 4y ago

He should call it The Big Short 2: Get Shorted.

indymike 4y ago
Maybe "Coming up Short".

chinathrow 4y ago

I'll pre-order it the day it's available. The big fry.

akgerber 4y ago

Reminds me of the documentary Weiner, which was supposed to be a comeback film about Anthony Weiner's run for NYC mayor but instead became an intimate portrait of a man's life (as well as that of his unfortunate wife) utterly collapsing.

seertaak 4y ago
True, only that Weiner was surprisingly endearing in that documentary. Despite at the time being a staunch republican, it's hard not to like the guy, and when the fall comes you're almost rooting for him. But SBF? The last interview I saw him give was I think with Levine; it was shocking because SBF was describing whence crypto derives its value. And Levine remarked that SBF was describing a Ponzi scheme. For me, that interview showed two things. First, that SBF quite obviously has no morals whatsoever. And second, he's not nearly as smart as he's portrayed to be. His whole cred derives from his MIT degree combined with his experience at Jane Street. Jane Street is a great firm, but what they do is really specific, and not necessarily the "coolest" way to make money. It's a lot of tech and infrastructure, less finance and trading chops. (The real badasses are RenTech, for example.) Anyway, I watched a few videos that he made while working at his crypto hedge fund, Alameda. He described the strategies, and they sounded like the typical market maker stuff - arbing exchange discrepancies yadda yadda. Not the most inspired stuff.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.
  - adamisom 4y ago
    One remark I have on anti-"ends justify the means" is they always ignore the ends. The "ends" might literally be saving real people's lives, whose lives have value. I'm sure there are good arguments against the idea, but you must engage with the ends that you propose we forsake, or you're just not serious.
    - wombatpm 4y ago
      If curing cancer for the rest of humanity now and forever required knowingly experimenting on and absolutely killing a certain number of people now, how many people could you justify with an Effective-Altruism ethical framework?
      - WJW 4y ago
        Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)
        imtringued 4y ago
        Longtermists simply assume we will harvest Hawking radiation for hundreds of billions of years after the heat death of the universe.
      - 4y ago
nickfromseattle 4y ago
There is also a documentary about a timeshare property mogul building the one of the biggest/most expensive personal home ever, I believe costs were over $100 million. Filming was in 2007, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the documentary devolves into watching this mogul go bankrupt. I remember a quote from the mogul, something like "I have nothing but the business. I've re-invested nearly every dollar I've ever earned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Versailles

latchkey 4y ago

It is almost as if someone has a Twitter bot... https://twitter.com/_mfrye/status/1590737441874288640 https://twitter.com/_mfrye/status/1590737441874288640

chubot 4y ago

Wow ... so I'm assuming Lewis could smell this a mile away, given his history? (Liar's Poker, etc.) It's funny that they seemingly weren't in on it -- "No it's not at all like the other things you wrote about".

dilyevsky 4y ago
ML wrote very favorably about IEX team in flash boys so maybe they thought it was like that

loeg 4y ago

I don't understand why anyone takes Lewis seriously after Flash Boys. He seems to just make things up from thin air.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
That book was entertaining, but so frustrating to read These big corporate traders are being paid millions to be the best at what they do (managing stock portfolios) and then it turns out they're actually awful at it and a bunch of genius math kids are running circles around them in the dark. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for the lazy, clueless, suit-wearing, trash-talking traders?
smcin 4y ago
Because he was superb since before then, for four decades now. I read Liar's Poker and was hooked from the first sentence. Look, Michael Lewis is like the Stephen Gaghan of (semi-fictionalized) socioeconomic zeitgeist: he chronicles concepts paradigmatic of an entire generation, people and personalities that affect or transform an entire decade or generation (usually in or about the US, and often Wall Street). And he nods towards the societal implications with a sense of urgency and inevitability but also dark theater. Sure he Hollywoodizes people and quotes, not dissimilar to how the screen adaptation of Mark Bowden's superb 'Black Hawk Down' merged characters and their story arcs, or how loosely 'War Dogs' (2016) was based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article [0] and 2015 book [1]. [As to 'War Dogs' and Lawson's writings, there's an obvious similar moral fable to three potheads from Miami Beach becoming in 2007 one of the Pentagon’s largest weapons suppliers, by reselling Chinese bullets to US-occupied Afghanistan, and noone at the Pentagon actually wanted to know where private contractors were getting their supply, as the scale of the contracts became increasingly insane.] If you want to more accurately label Lewis' genre "semi-fictionalized socioeconomic zeitgeist", then do. To be blunt, people have short attention spans, people in the US only read average 15.6 books/yr or median 4 books/yr [2], and moral ambiguity seems to sell worse than clean-cut tales casting characters as good guys and bad guys, certainly on the big screen. But these writers are still fulfilling an important service. Noone actually sits down and reads Inspector-General reports, CSPAN is occasionally great but usually dull to watch, and what now passes for US mainstream media is hopelessly coopted and long ago abandoned investigative reporting [3]. Writers like Lewis, Bowden, Lawson(, Crichton, Grisham [4]) fill a very real cultural void in interpreting what's going on. [0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers-how-two-american-kids-became-big-time-weapons-traders-176604/ https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers... [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-complete-story-of-the-300-million-stoner-arms-dealers-160311/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-comple... [2]: https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do-americans-read-per-year/ https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do... [3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar-became-the-number-one-political-podcast-in-a-week https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-wit... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995

SilasX 4y ago

Speaking of the Super Bowl, their ad aged really poorly. Someone posted a clip from it[1] that has Larry David being pitched on FTX as being a safe way to get into crypto, and he turns it down, saying he's never wrong about these things. The joke is supposed to be that he's being comically clueless to do so, because it follows a series of shorts[2] of him not "getting" the point of advancements like the wheel, the fork, the toilet, the Walkman, etc. But now he just looks wise! [1] https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136 https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136 [2] Full ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ