Throughout the book, Lewis appears far too willing to repeat at face value the things he was told by Bankman-Fried and those close to him. When introducing FTX’s in-house psychiatrist and “Senior Professional Coach”, for example, Lewis regurgitates Bankman-Fried’s claims that previous therapists were unhelpful to him “because they could not bring themselves to believe that he was who he was”. To Bankman-Fried, he was not the problem; it was the therapists who were wrong. Lewis seems to agree that those former therapists, whom he never interviewed, simply “failed to understand” Bankman-Fried.
At other points, he is quick to overlook the concerns others had with Bankman-Fried, or to take Bankman-Fried’s side. “Tara [Mac Auley] had long since decided that [Bankman-Fried] was dishonest and manipulative”, Lewis writes, not interrogating any further why one of Bankman-Fried’s cofounders had come to feel this way about him years before the eventual collapse. Lewis writes that at one point relationships among Alameda Research employees had deteriorated to the point that engineering director Nishad Singh found himself having to play “human buffer” between Bankman-Fried and others who Bankman-Fried constantly offended or upset, but Lewis concludes that those people “perhaps did not fully understand Sam”.
Finally, Lewis occasionally makes points that undermine even the things that he himself has said. Although it is bafflingly relegated to a footnote, Lewis explains that although FTX was a futures exchange, and so it did loan money to its customers, FTX’s whole selling point was that its “sophisticated risk engine” didn’t expose the company or its customers to potential losses from customers who made bad trades. The ultimate result is that it should never have been possible for there to be a “run on the exchange” as Lewis later describes, and it really undermines the unbelievable statements he’s been making lately in interviews: that “They had a great real business. If no one had cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customers deposits, they’d still be making tons of money.“4
Similarly, Lewis undermines his own belief in Bankman-Fried’s honesty and lack of fraudulent intent when he mentions that Bankman-Fried was aware of the missing customer funds at least as early as October — a detail that might not seem meaningful to those less familiar with the history because he fails to mention that Bankman-Fried continued to lie to the public into November that “FTX is fine. Assets are fine”.
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