"A Sam-Shaped Hole": SBF and the Allure of the Boy Genius
Why did so many adults fall in love with the greatest con man of his generation?
Hello to Dark Markets supporters. This is Part 1 of “A Sam-Shaped Hole,” a chapter in my forthcoming book on Sam Bankman-Fried, “The Boy Who Wasn’t There.” This and other chapter drafts can be accessed by Dark Markets supporters. New chapters or smaller related essays are posted most Sundays.
The support of Dark Markets subsribers has been crucial in helping me continue this work after losing my position at CoinDesk. You are immensely important and appreciated. Supporters are also invited to offer feedback on this work-in-progress - in fact, it is very, very helpful to hear fresh perspectives, and these are first drafts, so there are likely to be errors.
On September 22 of 2022, particularly avid readers of the technology press might have noticed a beautifully written, incredibly in-depth, and iridescently glowing new profile of Sam Bankman-Fried.
The profile delved into nearly every aspect of Bankman-Fried’s growing mythology: the “kimchi premium arbitrage” as the source of seed money for Alameda Research; his shared team “dorm” in the Orchid penthouse in the Bahamas; The meeting with Will MacAskill that turned Sam on to Effective Altruism; his incredible math skills and love of games.
The piece was titled “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex. Maybe You Should Too.”
There were some gestures at digging into the “complex” in that title – trying to understand what made SBF tick, including why he had adopted the Effective Altruist doctrine and its supposedly self-denying lifestyle. “Is he so deep in his head that he’s incapable of feeling pleasure?” asked writer Adam Fisher. Fisher put the question to FTX staff psychologist George Lerner, who insisted that “It’s not some pathological thing … For some bizarre reason—and I don’t get it—[the FTX executives] want to help.”
That question well sorted, the balance of the article focuses on the “Savior” part, celebrating the angelically pure intentions of Sam Bankman-Fried and his team of EAs. Fisher wraps up his profile by imagining what things were like in that Orchid penthouse: “It’s just SBF, his family (his mother, father and brother are all in town) and close friends. A small team dedicated to fixing the world—via the magic of quantitative reasoning and the overwhelming force of goodwill. All of them are united by the mission.”
Barely two weeks later, FTX would declare bankruptcy. Not long after that, the profile and its suddenly embarrassing gladhanding would disappear from the internet. (Thank god for The Wayback Machine.) If a magazine or newspaper had performed such a disappearing act, it would have been a scandal.
In this case, the scandal probably should have been how the piece got written in the first place: It was commissioned and published, not by any magazine, but by Sequoia Capital – a technology investing firm that had handed $213 million dollars over to Sam Bankman-Fried.
Sequoia, then, had plenty of motive for imagining a better version of Sam Bankman-Fried than turned out to be true - and no qualms about simply erasing their paid-for doggerel when things didn’t go their way.
Many, many others seem to have fallen into the same trap, imagining Bankman-Fried to be more wholesome, more brilliant, and simply more sucessful than turned out to be the truth. The goal of this chapter is to ask: Was SBF simply such a good con man that he got one over on the likes of hedge funder Bill Ackman and legendary finance writer Michael Lewis?
Or did they trick themselves?
“That fucker was playing League of Legends.”
Essentially, the Sequoia profile was an advertisement for FTX, and for Sam Bankman-Fried. But most of all, it was an ad for the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of FTX stock that Sequoia and other investors hoped would, at some unknown but hopefully not too distant moment, make them even more wildly rich.
The Sequoia piece runs to a staggering 13,000 words – the equivalent of 52 pages of a typical book. A profile of such depth and breadth is almost unheard of in the media today. Now that Google and Facebook have appropriated every media company’s revenues, GQ and Rolling Stone have long since concluded that this sort of huge article isn’t worth the investment.
Bankman-Fried really did want something from Anna Wintour, even if he hadn’t paid enough attention to realize it … Instead, Sam half-ignored Wintour to play Storybook Brawl, then blew off her invitation to the Met Gala.
That’s why the profile had to be funded and published by Sequoia, not by a journalistic outlet. Into the gap where Esquire might have once funded a genuinely neutral feature by a writer committed to the truth, Sequoia inserted a writer willing to churn out a 13,000 word hagiography of, it would turn out, a 30 year old criminal more inept and demented than anyone wanted to know.
What would soon become the most notorious bit of the profile came during a description of the meeting in which Sequoia itself had decided to invest in FTX, via a Zoom call in the summer of 2021.
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