Sam Bankman-Fried Didn't Have 'Character of a Thief', Argues Author Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, an account of the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, has argued that the disgraced FTX founder didn't have 'the character of a thief' in a new The Washington Post article. 'His crime was of a piece with his character. The character wasn't the character of a thief. It was the character of a person numb to risk.' Lewis explained in the final paragraphs of a 4,500 word essay adapted from a new introduction to his book. 'Unable to feel risk himself, he can't really imagine other people feeling much at all about the risk he has subjected them to....'

Lewis doubled down on previous claims that Bankman-Fried wasn't running a Ponzi scheme, arguing that 'The crime was unnecessary to the business in a way that, say, Bernie Madoff's was not,' and that 'The crime made no sense.' The collapse of FTX, he added, 'might have been avoided and FTX might have survived.'
'That doesn't mean I think that Sam Bankman-Fried is innocent. It merely informs how I feel about him,' Lewis explained. 'I think the truth is closer to 'young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake in trying to live by it' than 'criminal on the loose in the financial system.''

From from The Daily Beast:

Lewis also pointed to bankruptcy court filings from FTX in the weeks after Bankman-Fried's sentencing showing that 'against the $8.7 billion in missing customer deposits, FTX was now sitting on something like $14.5 to $16.3 billion.' 'Whatever the exact sum, it was enough to repay all depositors and various other creditors at least 118 cents on the dollar — that is, everyone who imagined they had lost money back in November 2022 would get their money back, with interest,' Lewis writes.

Michael Lewis's article offers some vivid details:
Inside of three years, he'd gone from socially and emotionally isolated 25-year-old with an upper-middle-class bank account to leader of a small army of math nerds and (according to Forbes magazine) not merely the world's richest person under 30 but maybe the fastest creator of wealth in recorded history... He'd gone from having no friends as a child to having too many as an adult without ever developing a capacity for friendship....

The prosecutors didn't need Sam's help. Sam helped them anyway by ignoring the counsel of his lawyers and testifying on his own behalf... As Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who presided over the case, said later: 'When he wasn't outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I've been doing this job for close to 30 years. I've never seen a performance quite like that....' [T]he judge ordered Sam to rise so that he might address him directly. Two hours or so earlier, Sam had shuffled into the courtroom in prison khakis with his head down and his hands oddly clasped behind his back. Just before he'd entered, his guards had told him he was meant to be wearing handcuffs and asked if he could create the impression that he was doing so...
'There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it's not a trivial risk, not a trivial risk at all,' said the judge. 'So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him.' He then sentenced Sam to 25 years in prison, with no possibility of parole.
A few minutes later, Sam dutifully clasped his hands behind his back and shuffled out of the courtroom.

Lewis adapted his 4,500-word article from the upcoming (updated) paperback edition of his book — which was originally published in 2023 on the same day jurors were selected for Bankman-Fried's trial...

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