10 ms·

FWIW, I didn't find Lewis's book as bad (or amoral) as it's often made out to be. Yes, he didn't put his judgement in every paragraph, but his description of SB

• compiler-guy 3y ago
  Lewis also soft-sells the polyamorous relationships and complications that caused around SBF's relationship with Caroline Ellison. Caroline wants to go public, and why that would be a much bigger deal in the polyamorous world they were living in. It's similar in many of Lewis's other analysis of SBF's relationships. Lewis avoids context that makes SBF look much worse.
  • thot_experiment 3y ago
    I'm not familiar with the book but this doesn't sound like it pattern matches with any of the poly I've experienced. Going public is a big deal in poly in particular? Since when? What kind of self respecting tech bro group house doesn't have a graph of all the poly on their whiteboard?
    • ametrau 3y ago
      Gross
    • compiler-guy 3y ago
      If it wasn't a big deal, SBF would have been OK with Ellison going public with it. But he wasn't, and held out against it. Lewis spends not a single word digging into SBF's motivations around that. Worse, he spends barely a chapter on how the polyamory which pervaded the highest levels of both Alameda and FTX might have clouded everyone's judgement and ability to say no. Mostly just limiting himself to: "It was a bunch of young adults all living together and who slept with whom changed rather fluidly. It wasn't a sex or orgy den, and the lurid tales about sex parties and all that aren't accurate." Which I guess is probably true as far as it goes. But not spending any time at all about how those relationships may have affected the corporate governance shows a strange lack of curiosity and unwillingness to think about conflicts of interest any relationship between business partners creates. [I have no problem with polyamory itself--as long as everyone is consenting it's not really any of my business.]
      • stickfigure 3y ago
        I love salacious details like everyone else, but it sounds like you're looking for data where none exists. Why would those relationships affect the company, and who is going to consent to an interview about it? What exactly are you expecting Lewis to do?
        • Eisenstein 3y ago
          The problem as I see it is not polyamory, it is casual sexual relationships between coworkers. It is kind of like why officers are not supposed to have relationships with their subordinates -- it subverts the authority that must exist in a structure where people are held accountable for decisions. By adding polyamory into the mixed it just made it worse since it increased the incidents exponentially.
          • stickfigure 3y ago
            Sure, that's what they tell you in MBA school... but the real world of starting up new businesses is not so simple. Let's take YC for example: https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html YC is a success, PG/JL's relationship survived, and nobody got indicted. They're role models. If YC failed or PG got divorced, people might view it differently. I guess what I'm saying is... I wouldn't read too much into SBF's sex life, and I wouldn't berate Lewis for not prying, especially with uncooperative subjects.
  • adolph 3y ago
    What does an IPO (or ICO?) have to to with “polyamorous world?”
    • smcin 3y ago
      No, parent means "going public [about their polyamorous relationship]".
  • meowface 3y ago
    What does "going public" mean in this context?
    • compiler-guy 3y ago
      Announcing to everyone around them that they were in a relationship.
• lazide 3y ago
  What is your definition of 'evil' if not self-serving, lacking in empathy for others, and amoral? Would he have to torture puppies for fun to check all the boxes? Because if so, Hitler loved dogs.
  • cutemonster 3y ago
    Maybe "evil" is a word for fiction stories only. In SBF's case, maybe "narcissist" is better (includes the properties you listed, and can like dogs)
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances Which is where it’s bullshit arising out of the incentives of access journalism. The Heinlen quote is more meaningful: you won’t be Sam. (If you’re in the set of people who could be Sam, the conversation is different.) But you might fall into his orbit.
• gizmo 3y ago
  I very much agree. "Number go up" by Faux is the better book in many respects, but Lewis's book contains much background info not reported elsewhere. Lewis's book is damning about SBF as you said. About how unapologetic and manipulative he is. About his willingness to gamble with other people's money. About his complete lack of ethical boundaries. About the casual way SBF ignored all laws he didn't like. About SBF's history of reckless gambling. Yes, Lewis was (and probably still is) sympathetic to SBF. But that's also how he got him to talk! The book wouldn't have been possible had Lewis behaved as a skeptical investigative journalist. Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
  • FabHK 3y ago
    > Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do. Very nicely put. Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset. On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto. Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.
    • Breza 3y ago
      Great recommendations! I've read all three of those books and they're terrific in different ways and all worth reading.
      • bigboy12 3y ago
        Everyone is a cocky MF until they get caught.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    > About how unapologetic and manipulative he is. About his willingness to gamble with other people's money. This describes most bankers? They’re generally smarter in that they work for an organization that dillutes responsibility for their crimes.
• tootie 3y ago
  Banality of evil. I'm sure SBF seems like a decent person who just wants to run a cool business and play with technology. He never thought he was a crook.
  • gizmo 3y ago
    I don't think the banality of evil applies here. Banality of evil is when cogs in a bureaucratic machine don't think about how their actions hurt others, because they are just processing paperwork or following standard operating procedure. Regular people doing regular people things can do great evil. In this case SBF was the architect and the driving force behind the fraud. He decided to comingle customers funds with business funds. He decided to trick banks into processing client money. He decided to split FTX into dozens of shell corporations to make effective oversight impossible. He decided to operate from Hong Kong and the Bahama's. Banality of evil might apply to a junior engineer at FTX. It doesn't apply to SBF who masterminded the whole criminal enterprise.
    • tootie 3y ago
      The phrase was coined in reference to Adolf Eichmann.
      • moritzwarhier 3y ago
        I think your usage/quote was bold but appropriate.
      • frenchyatwork 3y ago
        Yes, but it was coined to promote specific view of Eichmann that he himself tried to cast himself in: that he didn't really like murdering Jews, he was just following orders.
      • gizmo 3y ago
        Yes, and "banality of evil" is famously misunderstood: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-10-12/ty-article/the-grossly-misunderstood-banality-of-evil-theory/0000017f-db5b-d3a5-af7f-fbffca7e0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-10-12/ty-article/th... (Eichmann was a Nazi through and through, fiercely antisemitic, knew exactly what was going on, and liked it. He didn't just "go along with it" in the banal sense, he chose evil knowingly.)
• jimmydddd 3y ago
  I think I read that Lewis was almost finished with the book, which was about to come out, and which was highly pro-SBF, when the FTX scandal Broke? So he then had to quickly revise and "save" the book by changing the tone in view of the FTX scandal? If so, it's probably an unusual book in view of the last hour rewrites.
  • caturopath 3y ago
    That doesn't seem to be the case at all. A lot of the sympathetic content occurs _after_ the scandal and arrest, and Lewis has continued to take the same tone in interviews. Further, an inordinate amount of time is dedicated earlier in the book to a problem at Alameda that Lewis draws parallels to the scandal that took him down, clearly working toward his thesis. Lewis is one of the most-read living authors: they could have gotten a crack team of editors to help him revise the book in no time if he wanted to. It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. It's not even an implausible view.
    • nemo44x 3y ago
      > It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. He was a dumbass though. He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know...
      • polygamous_bat 3y ago
        > He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know.. This denies him agency. Probably a better hypothesis is that he was a raging narcissist who thought he could swindle everyone with none the wiser, without realizing how transparent his fraud was.
        • caturopath 3y ago
          It seems like for your theory to be better, it should fit the facts better (not saying it doesn't). Whether it seems agentic or not doesn't seem very relevant to whether it's what happened.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
  > kid He's a 32 year old man.
  • polygamous_bat 3y ago
    No no, he is rich so of course he is just a kid, lost in the sauce, accidentally squandering a few billion. Now, 16 year old male from a low income household, those are men, and should know the consequence of their actions better. /s This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.
    • queuebert 3y ago
      Propaganda or hired PR team influencing the discourse?
      • ljlolel 3y ago
        He dresses like a teenager
        • ben_w 3y ago
          So do most of my peers, and I'm 40. A few of us wear suit jackets now, but I think that's just to stand out from the crowds of jeans and t-shirts that became my generation's accidental dress code. (Though perhaps I'm just projecting; on the rare occasions I wear a suit jacket, that's what I'm thinking).
          • konfusinomicon 3y ago
            oh it was no accident. it took a lot of determined laziness and disregard for the casual Friday corporate culture BS by smarter than most people to change to rules.. band shirts, cargo shorts and skate shoes beats button downs, khakis, and leather loafers all day err day. got a not so casual work event to attend? bust out the nice grateful dead shirt, black zip up hoodie, and the jeans without the holes, and own it hard
• tptacek 3y ago
  The problem with Lewis's book is that it was pretty clear it was an on-a-dime pivot from the original story he had planned to tell, about a wunderkind revolutionizing finance and trying to save the world at the same time.
  • kolbe 3y ago
    And Lewis was into the original plot less than this one. Lewis is clearly on board with the progressive inclination to say that their cause is more important than operating within traditional bounds on behavior. Lewis was on board with SBF's irresponsible approach to risk management and regulatory oversight, because unlike Wall Streeters taking excessive risk for personal gain, SBF doing it for the sake of "improving humanity" was just breaking an egg to make an omelette.
    • bitcharmer 3y ago
      Yup, I'm really surprised by people defending Lewis. Don't get me wrong, I own most of his books but his 60 minutes interview about SBF was a cringe fest.
      • filoleg 3y ago
        Yeah, I think those people just didn’t watch Lewis’ interviews on SBF. Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things). I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially. [0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.
• embwbam 3y ago
  #2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle. All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.
• paulpauper 3y ago
  A good biography does not cast too many moral aspersions. Its job is to paint a portrait of the person's life, including the details and quirks that shed insight into the subject's character. If you want affirmations of the awfulness of SBF and his crimes, there is no shortage of that by media and pundits.
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Not for nuttin' but that sounds like Aspergers. Mind you, I'm not a trained professional (to make that diagnosis). It's also no excuse. That said, it makes a case for being aware of your blindspots (read: weaknesses). And if you think you have none... Well that's a blind spot. Fucking deal with it.
• greedo 3y ago
  So much of the apologia for SBF is disgusting. I don't need to have any humility, because I don't steal from people. I don't throw colleagues and lovers under the bus when I get caught stealing. I have humility and don't believe I'm the savior of crypto, the unbanked, etc etc. His entire worldview reeks of hubris and narcissism on a level I find disgusting and so common in "bro" culture. The idea that he can get out in 25 years makes me sad with our justice system.
  • gjvc 3y ago
    Absolutely. White-collar crime destroys lives.
• bunabhucan 3y ago
  Since the type of financial situation and financier Lewis writes about typically is amoral but also is sure that they are correct and proper, Lewis' continued access to future SBFs requires that he offload judgement to the reader. It's almost like a realtime version of "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" or "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly".
• 747-8F 3y ago
  Thank you very much for using 'deontological'. I learned a very useful word today
• setgree 3y ago
  A recent HN thread led me to this article of his which I found delightful: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/jonathan-lebed-s-extracurricular-activities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/jonathan-lebed-s...
• mattmaroon 3y ago
  Im a big Michael Lewis fan and my only major gripe with that book is that he released it when the trial began, which meant he had to finish it well before. He left out the ending. It’s an interesting story but it’s basically a cliffhanger with no sequel. He cut out right at the point where we learn the gritty details.
• hintymad 3y ago
  > a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) Wow, I can’t fathom how one could believe everyone else is stupid. Yeah, SBF went to MIT, but really the best students in each descent university likely fall into the same percentile of academic talent. Or, as Bezos used to say, people can be smart in a thousand ways.
• serf 3y ago
  >And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god. that criteria is applicable to literally any criminal, ever. It's effectively useless as a statement about crime and punishment, although it serves as a useful reminder to those not condemned. >2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil". moral standpoint doesn't put you in shackles, poor judgement when comparing your morality with that of society is what does that. finance is one of the most amoral industries to ever exist. They sit next to weapons and land-mine manufacturers, as far as i'm concerned. Amorality is a benefit to the financier, the trick is finding someone that is amorale while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution. SBFs morality doesn't matter -- what broke him was his poor judgement and overzealous confidence. We're not condemning him for his morality, that just speaks better to the court; he's in trouble because his plans backfired and money was lost for important people. (p.s. we don't imprison people for being 'amorale', whatever that might mean from whoever is saying it.)
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    > the trick is finding someone that is amoral while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution. Uber and WeWork come to mind.