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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 i

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.
- lancesells 3y ago
  This guy was lying like crazy in the media. He even said it was a ponzi scheme. Maybe he's a dumbass but he's also a criminal who was committing crimes while out there doing PR the whole time. Even during his trial he was lying so let's not act like he was in over his head and made some mistakes. He's never even owned up to it.
adamgordonbell 3y ago
If you are talking about the time Alameda lost track of a bunch of money, and everyone freaks out except SBF, who turns out to be right, that story was hilarious foreshadowing. Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much. He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent". One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy. A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  this exactly. the freakonomics podcast (iirc, maybe the economist's money talks?) did a long form interview with the "emergency CEO" that was parachuted in when ftz filed for bankruptcy. my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys. ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam. it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money". tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.
  - adamgordonbell 3y ago
    Well also they made a percentage on any money coming in and out of FTX. That gave them a buffer of profit, a free money machine basically. That could paper over any problems until the problems became big enough to sink them. He also made and then lost a crazy amount of money at Jane Street during election night before he started all this. He was a gambler.

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.
lancesells 3y ago
This guy was lying like crazy in the media. He even said it was a ponzi scheme. Maybe he's a dumbass but he's also a criminal who was committing crimes while out there doing PR the whole time. Even during his trial he was lying so let's not act like he was in over his head and made some mistakes. He's never even owned up to it.

adamgordonbell 3y ago

If you are talking about the time Alameda lost track of a bunch of money, and everyone freaks out except SBF, who turns out to be right, that story was hilarious foreshadowing. Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much. He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent". One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy. A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.

inhumantsar 3y ago
this exactly. the freakonomics podcast (iirc, maybe the economist's money talks?) did a long form interview with the "emergency CEO" that was parachuted in when ftz filed for bankruptcy. my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys. ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam. it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money". tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Well also they made a percentage on any money coming in and out of FTX. That gave them a buffer of profit, a free money machine basically. That could paper over any problems until the problems became big enough to sink them. He also made and then lost a crazy amount of money at Jane Street during election night before he started all this. He was a gambler.