Michael Lewis’s new book has made a positive difference to Sam Bankman-Fried

I haven't read Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Doomsday Machine, but I find it hard to believe that the author gave much sympathy to those involved in the US housing bubble before the 2008 financial crisis. In contrast, FTX's former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has a relatively rosy account.

In The Rise and Fall of the New Tycoon, published on October 3, Lewis revealed many unknown details about the fall of FTX. These include the SBF's attempt to pay former President Donald Trump not to run for office again and writing to former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison detailing the pros and cons of his sexual relationship. But it wasn't about Bankman-Fried's background that stood out – the vast majority of the material was devoted to explaining how SBF's brain works with money and relationships with other people.

An entire chapter is devoted to SBF's own motivation behind effective charity: to give people the idea that they should earn as much money as possible and make the world a better place. But the word seems to be the theme of the book, painting a picture of the SBF gathering effective believers with little experience in crypto or finance to frame Alameda and FTX as crusaders working towards a good cause – largely ignoring what was happening on the other side, after it all went down. Many FTX users are losing their savings.

When FTX was forced to declare bankruptcy in November 2022, many people were hurt financially and emotionally. Some media have described SBF as a rising star that could one day bridge the gap between crypto and traditional finance, and FTX has captured billions of dollars from many retail investors. Unless those investors were quick to cash out immediately once the exchange's downward spiral began, most were out of their money for months.

Related: From Bernie Madoff to Bankman-Fried, Bitcoin maximalists confirmed

According to the book, Ellison's farewell message to the Alameda workers following the collapse seemed indifferent, out of touch with the fact that people were losing jobs, money and credibility. Lewis appears to have changed this narrative only once, describing a conversation between former FTX chief operating officer Constance Wang and SBF following the exchange's bankruptcy.

“When you do this, do you ever think about how many people this event will affect, and that's part of your ‘first expected value' calculation?” Wang said.

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However, both before and after writing about this conflict, Lewis seems to have elevated Bahnmann-Fried in many ways, often framing the narrative around him as a highly skilled businessman but completely incompetent at tasks that most adults take for granted. It included details of FTX's headquarters in the Bahamas, which was planned for a cube made of pure tungsten. The book concludes with Lewis' discovery of the object and the SBF's only commentary on the effort, “Badminton Courts.”

It is doubtful that the prosecutors trying to prosecute the former FTX CEO would have had any charges if only the information found in Going Infinite had been available. The case could have been treated as a dispute and settled out of court. Lewis himself concluded that the FTX user fund “went nowhere” and that the hedge fund managers had no knowledge of the abuse before the exchange collapsed.

“All kinds of people who didn't really know what was going on in Sam's world now thought they knew everything they needed to know. A surprising number thought the crime should be exposed. It wasn't.”