Inventing an Altruist: How Sam Bankman-Fried Faked Morality

There's a sucker born every minute. But sometimes they need some help. "A Sam-Shaped Hole," Part 2

Welcome back to The Boy Who Wasn’t There – a live preview of my book in progress on Sam Bankman-Fried, the most fascinating con artist since L. Ron Hubbard. This is Part 2 of “A Sam-Shaped Hole: SBF and the Allure of the Boy Genius.” You can find Part 1 here. (These installments usually arrive on Sunday, but this week’s is shifted to Thursday.)

Here are previous installments in the project, roughly in recommended reading order:

• The Boy Who Wasn’t There – Why Sam Bankman-Fried Matters. A statement of purpose for the entire book.

• How Sam Bankman-Fried Stole the Future (Introduction Part 1).

• Blitzscaling (Introduction Part 2)

• The Stanford Parent Experiment

• Sins of the Mother: How the $8 Billion FTX Scam Flowed from Barbara Fried’s Philosophy (Part 1)

• The Theory and Practice of Raising a Criminal (Sins of the Mother Part 2)

• The Fiction of Barbara Fried. Sam’s mother wrote short stories with intriguing perspectives on parenthood and talent.

• “A Sam-Shaped Hole” (Part 1)

• Michael Lewis Thinks Sam Bankman-Fried’s Trial was Like a “Lynching.”

• The Bankman-Fried Defenders Can’t Stop

• FTX, Moonstone Bank, and the CIA’s “Bank of Crooks and Criminals.” Towards one theory of why SBF has so many defenders.

All this and more is available to premium subscribers.

If you’d like to further support my work, and/or you want a memento of the SBF criminal trial, watch this space for the return of Rare Sams. These NFTs act as certificates of authenticity for a series of courtroom sketches of Sam, Gary, Nishad, and other major figures drawn live during the October SDNY trial, which was barred to cameras. They also include full lifetime access to premium Dark Markets content.

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Michael Lewis was far from alone in falling under Sam Bankman-Fried’s strange anti-glamour. This schlubby, unkempt, chaotic man-child was worshipped far and wide, not just as a genius of finance and technology, but as the herald of an entirely new age.

Part of the implicit logic is that Sam’s distraction, disorganization, and indifference to convention suggested his brain was so full of more important things that he couldn’t be bothered. Of course, that logic only swayed people because Sam was also rich: without the overlay of vast wealth, he would have seemed as underwhelming as he turned out in fact to be. The money remains so crucial to Sam’s partisans that even months after his decisive criminal conviction, they were still insisting that he was, to quote a January 2024 op-ed by two Harvard and Yale professors, “a brilliant businessman.” Of course, that money, and that business brilliance, were both illusions underwritten by the theft of customer funds.

Regardless, this is a pattern deeply embedded in the brains of people close to technology and finance. Going back at least to Steve Wozniak of Apple, awkward nerds have been the engines of innovation and wealth for decades. In the 2000s and 2010s, the “tech billionaire in a hoodie” became a widespread meme: being casual was a direct sign you’re so brilliant and ahead of the curve you don’t have to care about ceremony. The most immediate parallel is Mark Zuckerberg, who has struggled comically to prove his humanity, while guiding the creation of an entirely novel, hugely profitable, and, it should be noted, largely malevolent digital world.

Since Zuckerberg’s day, another relevant vector has come into play – the proliferation of get-rich-quick scams and over-the-top wealth grifters. These are the fake rich guys who rent Lamborghinis to flex on TikTok, who sell drop-shipping courses or even vaguer bullshit. They’ve come to have a certain cultural weight, becoming an instantly recognizable “type” of guy – a type anyone with half a brain cell steered clear of.

But Sam was the opposite of all of that. He didn’t dress to impress anyone. He was a billionaire who drove a Toyota Corolla, slept on a beanbag, and lived in a dorm! And it wasn’t just indifference – he had big plans to do good things with all the money he was making, not just keep it for himself. SBF was, by every apparent signal, the opposite of what our culture had decided a con artist looked like. But of course, it turned out that’s exactly what he was.

This might have been a kind of accident: Sam might have been both a naturally dishevelled and socially inept guy, and also a Madoff-style schemer. But in fact, the two things were very closely linked: as a virtuousic New York Magazine package put it after the collapse, the virtue was the con – and so were the frizzy hair, the cargo shorts, the Toyota Corolla, and maybe even the beanbag.

After FTX’s collapse, it became almost immediately clear that Sam Bankman-Fried was far from the boyish bumbler his mythos made him out to be. Within days, he seemed to admit that his attachment to Effective Altruism was in large part a strategic pose intended to make people think he was a good person – when in fact Bankman-Fried didn’t even believe such a thing as a “good person” existed. More shocking still, over the course of his criminal trial, it would be revealed that both his supposed vows of poverty and his disheveled appearance were intensely calculated choices, some of which he had maintained for years, specifically as a way of making more money.

This led to one of the most clear and embarrassing illustrations of just how badly Michael Lewis misread Sam. Describing Sam’s appearance in Going Infinite, Lewis tells us that things like his screwball hair reflected “a decision not to make a decision” – an indication that his focus was on things that mattered.

But nothing could have been further from the truth. Sam Bankman-Fried was obsessed with how he was perceived – he was achingly aware that not only his physical appearance, but what he claimed to believe, made people feel a certain way about him. In fact, it seems reasonable to think he was far more concerned with the impression he was making on the public than he was with the substance of what he was doing.

And the goal of those canny machinations – the goal that Michael Lewis and others sacrificed their reputations to help Sam achieve – was, quite simply, to steal people’s money.

Song of My Sam

The first clear sign that Sam Bankman-Fried was not the person he claimed to be came just a few days after the collapse of FTX, on November 12 of 2022. Kelsey Piper, a writer from Vox, had reached out in the wake of FTX’s collapse to ask Bankman-Fried a few questions. The conversation happened via direct text messages, so I’ve reformatted it below for readability.

“I’m sort of putting together a picture,” Piper asked, “Where you don’t believe anyone is doing anything for good reasons, you don’t believe the ‘good guys’ are good, so why not make it big and then be the one who gets to decide what ‘good’ is? And if you have to do sketchy stuff along the way, everyone else is doing it too, and plenty of them are worse, and people still like them as long as they win. Is that fair?”

“Eh there’s *some* truth to it,” Sam admitted. “But it’s *also* true that I didn’t want to do sketchy stuff, there are huge negative effects from it. And I didn’t mean to. Each individual decision seemed fine and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end.”

“Everyone goes around pretending that perception reflects reality,” Sam continued. “It doesn’t. Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.”

Piper replies by drawing the obvious inference: “So you kinda don’t believe in, like, ‘doing unethical shit’, as anything other than a judgment we bestow upon the losers? …. So [was] the ethics stuff – mostly a front? People will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that’s how it all really works?”

“Yeah. I mean that’s not *all* of it. But it’s a lot …”

“You were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers.”

“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.”

It’s notable here that “those who get fucked” in this construction could include the people who fell for Sam’s own performance of morality. More generally, again, it’s clear that if Sam Bankman-Fried actually has any underlying sense of ethics, he has allowed it to be completely overtaken by a perceived need to appear virtuous as part of a tactical game. Everything he’s saying here, he’s clearly saying about himself.

In this moment of honesty, Sam is essentially admitting he doesn’t thing there’s any such thing as morality at all – just a story told by the victors. In this, Sam seems like many of those attracted to Effective Altruism. They often describe feeling morally lost, and looking for some “objective” way to be sure they’re leading good lives. We’ve seen that Sam was raised in a highly ideological household ultimately premised on atheism, rationalism, and a breed of moral relativism known as “utilitarianism.”

Viewed through this lens, Sam and the other EAs represent something endlessly sad about life in the 21^st century – we are free to create our own meaning, but for some people, that leaves a vacuum of any meaning at all. The EAs want to do math about morality because they have so little moral intuition, whether passed down from parents or honed by lived experience of other people.

For Sam, though, Effective Altruism never seems to have actually healed that primal wound, instead leaving him cynically convinced that all morality is a performance designed to curry favor. Given his engagement with the Effective Altruists for the better part of a decade – and especially given that the movement’s leaders are known to have helped cover for some of Sam’s early misdeeds – one wonders whether that cynicism was learned from experience.

The Hair That Wasn’t There

This unmasking of SBF’s fraudulent Effective Altruism came almost immediately after the collapse of FTX. It would be another year before, during his criminal trial, it became clear how much else about Sam Bankman-Fried was a calculated snowjob – or, as Caroline Ellison put it on the witness stand, a “very proactive approach” to public relations.

That PR campaign included, most shockingly of all, Sam’s hair.

Early in “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis writes about Sam’s “black curls” that “exploded off his head in every direction … it was just a mess, and like everything about Sam’s appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision.”

Lewis sees Sam, in short, as both work-obsessed and a naif, free of all pose and pretense. As Barbara Fried put it, a person completely unable to tell a lie.

But according to Caroline Ellison, the hair itself was a lie - or at least, a performance. She testified that Sam had told her his hair was a way of making more money: "Ever since Jane Street, he thought he had gotten higher bonuses because of his hair, and that it was an important part of FTX's narrative and image.”