Opinion | Michael Lewis: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s last year in crypto

Most of the people who went to work for Sam Bankman-Fried ended up in jobs for which they were not obviously qualified, and Natalie Tien was no exception. She’d been raised in Taiwan by middle-class parents whose only real hope for her was that she’d find a rich husband. She was highly agreeable and ill-designed for rebellion. She still reflexively covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. And yet she’d been determined to prove to her parents that they’d underestimated her. After college she’d gone hunting not for a husband but for work. She’d been so anxious about her own ambition that, before each interview, she’d write out and memorize exactly what she wanted to say about herself. She’d landed the first real job she’d applied for, at an English-language training company, and it had bored her to tears. But then, in 2018, at the age of 28, she’d discovered crypto.

The previous year, the price of bitcoin had risen almost twenty-fold, from $1,000 to $19,000, and the daily trading volumes had boomed by some massive amount that was hard to precisely quantify. Across Asia, new cryptocurrency exchanges were popping up every month to service the growing gambling public. They all had deep pockets and an insatiable demand for young women. “Requirements are: pretty, big boobs, have done live streaming before, born in 2000 or later, good at chit-chatting,” read the job ad for a salesperson at the fastest-growing new exchange. By 2018 a lot of young Asian women were trying to meet those requirements. Natalie took a different approach. She spent a month reading everything she could find about cryptocurrencies and blockchains. “Everyone called it a scam,” she said, and she worried about that. Once on the inside, she was struck by how few of the people who worked in crypto could explain what a bitcoin was. The businesses themselves didn’t always know what they were doing, or why. They were hiring lots of people because they could afford to, and big headcounts signaled their importance. What kept Natalie going, and ignoring the feeling that whatever talent she might possess was being wasted, was her feeling that crypto might be the next big thing. “I thought of it as a gamble with nothing to lose,” she said.

By June 2020 she was working for her second Asian crypto exchange when she heard about the opening at FTX. Like the other exchanges, FTX hired her quickly, after a single interview, and she became the company’s 49th employee. FTX was different from the other exchanges, mainly because the guy who ran it, Sam Bankman-Fried, was different. Every man Natalie had ever met in crypto had been chiefly interested in money and women, and Sam was chiefly interested in neither — though it took her a while to figure out what it was he was chiefly interested in. Everything here is five times, she thought. Five times more work, five times more growth, five times more money, five times more responsibility. No one came out and said that you had to work all the time, or that there was no room for a life outside work, but anyone at FTX who tried to live a normal life simply didn’t stick. Natalie stuck, and within months of moving to FTX’s Hong Kong offices found herself named head of the company’s public relations. What was peculiar about this — apart from the fact that she had no real experience in public relations — was that FTX had no public relations. “When I joined, Sam didn’t believe in PR,” said Natalie. “He thought it was all bullshit.”

At the start, Natalie found herself trying to persuade Sam that he should talk to journalists, while at the same time trying to persuade journalists that they should talk to Sam. “In July 2020 no journalist was interested in Sam,” she said. “Zip.” The mania for crypto recalled Rotterdam circa 1637, when a single tulip bulb traded for roughly triple the price of a Rembrandt. And every day more of it was being traded on FTX. And Natalie kept pushing on journalists, and on Sam.

On the morning of May 11, 2021, Sam made his first television appearance. He sat at his trading desk and talked into his computer screen to two female reporters on Bloomberg TV. Thick black curls exploded off his head in every direction. People who tried to describe Sam’s hair would give up and call it an “Afro,” but it wasn’t an Afro. 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. He wore what he always wore: a wrinkled T-shirt and cargo shorts. His bare knee jackhammered up and down at roughly four beats per second, while his eyes darted left and right and collided with his interviewers’ gaze only by chance. His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends. He’d done nothing to prepare, but the questions were so easy that it didn’t matter. Crypto Wunderkind, read the Bloomberg chyron, while the numbers on the left of the screen showed that, in just the past year, bitcoin’s price had risen by more than 500 percent.

That first TV show Natalie watched from her own desk, but later, during future interviews, she’d walk around behind Sam to confirm that, yes, his eyes moved around so much because he was playing a video game. On live TV! Often, on live TV, Sam would not only play a video game but respond to messages, edit documents and tweet. The TV interviewer would ask him a question and Sam would say, “Ahhhh, interesting question” — even though he never found any of the questions interesting. And Natalie knew he was just buying time to exit whatever game he was playing and reenter the conversation. Natalie didn’t know how a person was supposed to behave on live television, but she suspected it wasn’t like this. Yet even as she watched Sam’s first television performance she sensed it might play well. Sam was odd on TV, but he was also odd in real life. In real life people who encountered him often thought he was the most interesting person they’d ever met. She decided against media training — or anything that might make Sam seem less like Sam.

Not long after that first Bloomberg interview, Forbes magazine showed up. (Back in 2017, when Forbes had begun to track crypto fortunes, Sam’s name hadn’t even made the list of people whose fortunes they should track; but by that time, Sam could not have told you what a bitcoin was, and in any case he had been worth approximately zero dollars.) “He kind of came out of nowhere,” said Steve Ehrlich, the reporter Forbes assigned to figure out the net worth of this 29-year-old nobody. “It shocked me. It wasn’t that he had bought bitcoin and it had gone from zero to 20,000.” Inside of three years, it appeared, Sam Bankman-Fried had created a business so valuable that his share of it implied that he was now the richest person in the world under the age of 30. “When I first looked at the numbers, I was like, Can this really be true — can this guy really be worth $20 billion?” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, who led the Forbes team of investigators. “It was pretty much unprecedented. No one else had gotten richer faster except for Mark Zuckerberg, and it was very close.”

From that question they soon jumped to another: Exactly how much more than $20 billion might this guy be worth? In addition to the crypto exchange, FTX, Sam also owned and controlled a crypto quant trading firm called Alameda Research. The year before, 2020, with just a handful of employees, Alameda had generated a billion dollars in trading profits and was accumulating stakes in other companies, and crypto tokens, at a bewildering rate. The closer you got to Alameda Research, the less it seemed like a hedge fund and the more it resembled a dragon’s lair, stuffed with random treasures. The Forbes wealth analysts had always tried to keep things simple: Your assets were worth only what other people were willing to pay for them. That approach had worked during the dot-com bubble, when everyone could agree that even though Pets.com was ridiculous it was still worth $400 million, because investors were willing to buy it at that valuation. But with these new crypto fortunes, the Forbes approach to wealth only got you so far. What to do, for instance, with the Solana tokens Sam owned inside Alameda Research? Hardly anyone knew what Solana was — a new cryptocurrency minted to rival bitcoin — much less how to value it. On the one hand, the current market price implied that Sam’s Solana stash was worth maybe $12 billion; on the other hand, Sam owned roughly 10 percent of all the Solana in the world. It was hard to know what anyone would pay for it if Sam tried to sell it all. Forbes pretty much just ignored Sam’s Solana holdings, along with most of the rest of the contents of his dragon’s lair.

As Sam went back and forth with the Forbes reporters, he — and Natalie — worried mainly that they’d publish a number that would require him to explain more than he wanted to explain. He’d walked the Forbes people through what they knew, or thought they knew. “There were two reasons I talked to them,” he said. “First, it was going to be in there anyway. And second, it makes them trust us more.” Still, he was worried that if he told Forbes everything, they might tell everyone that he was as rich as he thought himself to be. “I didn’t just send them the number: Here’s what I’m worth,” he said. “It would set the wrong tone. The number was too big. If it comes out in Forbes that I’m worth $100 billion, it’s going to be weird and it’s going to fuck things up.” He hadn’t sent them the list of the 100 or so businesses he’d acquired over the previous two years, for example. His story might be fantastic, but he needed it to be believable.

It turned out that Sam had nothing to worry about. In November 2021, Forbes listed his net worth at $22.5 billion, a notch below Rupert Murdoch and a notch above Laurene Powell Jobs. Twenty-two-and-a half-billion dollars was roughly what you got if you simply agreed with the world’s leading venture capital firms that FTX’s crypto exchange business by itself was worth $40 billion. Sam owned 60 percent of FTX: 60 percent of $40 billion was $24 billion. Still, in the 40 years since Forbes began tracking rich people’s money, he was an outlier. “He was the richest self-made newcomer to the Forbes list, ever,” said Peterson-Withorn. “And we could easily have justified a much bigger number. We tried to be conservative.” Sam’s number was so believable that Forbes’s executives were soon asking if he might like to buy their company, too.

When Sam saw the response to the Forbes billionaires list, and the Forbes cover that followed, any doubts he had about the value of public relations evaporated. Natalie’s job became both simpler and more complicated. Simpler, because basically everyone now wanted to talk to Sam, and Sam was game to talk to anyone — so long as he could play a video game while doing it. Sam went from being totally private to being a media whore. He was as happy to yak for an hour in a completely unguarded way with the reporter from the Westwego Crypto Daily as he was to speak with the New York Times. Natalie compiled lists for Sam, with notes on the hundred or so journalists likely to walk into his field of vision, and advice on how to handle them. For example: “This person is just, like, an asshole so be very careful with him.” Or: “You can’t avoid the Financial Times guy but be very cautious around anyone from the Financial Times because the Financial Times is very anti-crypto.”

Being the head of public relations for a booming multinational corporation wasn’t all that difficult. “You just do and learn at the same time,” Natalie said brightly. The hard part of her job was Sam. The demand for his time soon reached the point that Natalie took on a second role, as Sam’s personal scheduler. It always had been Natalie the Financial Times reporter was meant to call if he wanted to set a time with Sam; now it was Natalie whom Sam’s father also needed to call if he hoped to get 15 minutes with his son. By the end of 2021, Natalie, and Natalie alone, knew where Sam was at any given moment, and where he might next go, and how to get him to do what he needed to do. She didn’t actually have all that much in common with her boss, but to do her job she had to be inside his head. “You need to learn how to get along with him,” she said. “And it’s kind of mysterious how to get along with him.”

A year into her job, Natalie had become as good as anyone at predicting what Sam might do, and why. And yet even to Natalie, Sam remained a puzzle. She could never be sure where he was, for a start. “Don’t expect that he’ll tell you where he’s going to be at when,” said Natalie. “He’ll never tell you. You need to be smart and fast to find out by yourself.” And Sam might be anywhere, at any hour. She’d book him a room for two nights at the Four Seasons in Washington, and Sam might even check in, but never enter the room. He had more trouble with sleep than anyone she’d ever known. At 2 in the morning, she might find him at his desk talking to some journalist halfway around the world, or wandering around some deserted street tweeting up a storm, or really anyplace but in his bed. But then at 2 in the afternoon, when he was meant to be on live television, he might be asleep on the beanbag chair beside his desk. “There is not such a thing as on times and off times with him,” said Natalie. There had been nights Natalie had gone to bed at 3 a.m., set an alarm for 7, woken up to see what public relations shitstorm Sam might have caused in the interim, set a second alarm for 8, checked again, then set another alarm and fallen back to sleep until 9:30.

Sam’s approach to his commitments was an even bigger issue. Natalie mapped out every minute of Sam’s days — not just the TV appearances but the meetings with other CEOs, and curious celebrities, and rulers of small countries. She put nothing on Sam’s schedule that he had not agreed to. More often than not, it was Sam who had suggested some meeting or public appearance. And yet Sam treated everything on his schedule as optional. The schedule was less a plan than a theory. When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and 100 on the other. All he had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time. The dial would swing wildly as he calculated and recalculated the expected value of each commitment, right up until the moment he honored it or didn’t. “He’ll never tell you what he’s going to do,” explained Natalie. “You have to always be prepared it’s going to change every second.” Every decision Sam made involved an expected value calculation. The numbers in Sam’s mind were always shifting. One midnight, for instance, he had sent Natalie a message that read: “There’s a 60 percent chance I’ll go to Texas tomorrow.” “What does that mean, a 60 percent chance?” asked Natalie. “I can’t book 60 percent of an airplane and 60 percent of a car, or 60 percent of a hotel room in Texas.”

Of course, she didn’t say that to Sam directly. Instead, she tried to anticipate the shifting odds before Sam made his calculations. She learned to humor the professor at Harvard, for example, by saying, “Yes, Sam told me he agreed to come and speak to a room full of important Harvard people at 2 next Friday. It’s on his schedule.” Yet even as she uttered those words, she’d already invented the excuse she’d make to that same Harvard person, likely next Thursday night, to explain why Sam would be nowhere near Massachusetts. Sam has covid. The prime minister needed to see Sam. Sam is stuck in Kazakhstan.

The funny thing about these situations was that Sam never really meant to cause them, which in a way made them feel even more insulting. He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations. With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time. “You’re always going to be apologizing to different people, and you’ll do that every day,” said Natalie.

Natalie loved her job. Sam had never once been cruel or abusive or even flirty. Just the opposite: She felt protected by him from the abuse of others. He’d occasionally surprise her with some kindness — for example, after he’d met privately with former president Bill Clinton and asked him what the United States might do if China invaded Taiwan. Whatever Clinton had told Sam had prompted him to seek her out afterward and suggest that she move her parents out of Taiwan. Sam seldom even disagreed with her. He’d invariably seem open to her ideas — and sometimes, as with Bloomberg TV, he’d actually do what she suggested. “Yup,” he’d always say. “Yup” was Sam’s go-to word, and the less he’d actually listened to whatever you’d just said, the longer he drew it out. Yuuuuuuuuup. “He’s not direct, most of the time,” said Natalie. “He’ll say ‘yup’ or ‘that’s interesting’ and he doesn’t really mean that. So you need to figure out when he is just avoiding conflict, and when he means it.”

By early 2022 Sam’s situation was totally out of hand. Every important person on the planet seemed to want to get to know him. He had said yes to them all. Anyone else in Sam’s situation would have built out a huge network of schedulers and advisers and gatekeepers. Sam had only Natalie, who was no longer just Sam’s public relations head and Sam’s private scheduler but, on occasion, Sam’s bodyguard. She was a circus juggler with a thousand balls in the air. No one ball was all that important, but Natalie sensed that any given ball, if dropped, might trigger a cascading crisis. And on the morning of Feb. 14, one of those balls had her especially worried.

Three days earlier, Sam had boarded a private plane in the Bahamas bound for Los Angeles, with nothing but his laptop and a change of underwear. Since then, he’d had brunch with Shaquille O’Neal and dinner with the Kardashians, and had watched the Super Bowl with the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. He’d chatted with Hillary Clinton and Orlando Bloom. He’d attended four parties and had met with entrepreneurs who wanted him to buy their businesses, and also with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was eager to get to know Sam better. For the previous three nights Natalie hadn’t been entirely sure where, or if, Sam had slept, but she knew he’d checked into the room she’d booked for him at the Beverly Hilton, because she’d watched him do it.

Now, on the 14th, the hotel room looked as if he’d never arrived. The sheets were still crisp, the pillows undented, the trash cans empty, the bathroom sparkling. The only sign of a human presence in the room was Sam himself. He sat at the desk in the same wrinkled T-shirt and baggy cargo shorts he’d worn on the plane ride in. As always, he was doing several things at once: checking his phone, applying ChapStick to his perpetually parched lips, opening and closing windows on his laptop — all while his knee jackhammered at four beats a second. His assigned task — the one Natalie had reminded him about the night before, and again this morning — was being on time for his Zoom meeting. He was already late. Yet another very important person who really wanted to meet him was waiting for him inside his laptop.

“Hey, this is Sam!” said Sam, to his laptop, as his Zoom box opened.

Onto his screen popped Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue magazine. She wore a tight yellow dress and careful makeup and a bob cut so sharply that its fringes plunged and curved down around her face like the blades of two scythes. “I’m so happy to finally meet you!” she said.

“Hey, it’s great to meet you too!” Sam replied.

Sam didn’t really know who Anna Wintour was. Natalie and others had briefed him, but he hadn’t paid attention. He knew Anna Wintour edited a magazine. He might or might not have been dimly aware that Meryl Streep had played a character inspired by her in “The Devil Wears Prada,” and that she’d ruled the treacherous world of women’s fashion since — well, since before Sam was born. She looked like a million bucks, but her art, like all art, was wasted on Sam. When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance — even a person he’d slept with — he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

As Anna Wintour began to speak, he clicked a button and she vanished from his screen. In her place popped his favorite video game, “Storybook Brawl.” He had only a few seconds to choose his character.

He picked the Hoard Dragon. The Hoard Dragon was maybe Sam’s favorite hero to play.

“Yup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour was saying. He could still hear her through headphones. Unless she watched his eyes, she had no reason to think that he wasn’t paying attention. Sam didn’t want to seem rude. It was just that he needed to be playing this other game at the same time as whatever game he had going in real life. His new social role as the world’s most interesting new child billionaire required him to do all kinds of dumb stuff. He needed something, other than what he was expected to be thinking about, to occupy his mind. And so, oddly, the more important he became in the eyes of the world, the more important these games became to him.

“Storybook Brawl” had everything Sam loved in a game. It pitted him against live opponents. It required him to make lots of decisions quickly. Games without clocks bored Sam. It energized him to have seconds ticking away as he assembled his platoon of fantasy characters — dwarves, witches, monsters, princesses and so on. Each character came with two numbers attached to it: how much damage it could inflict on other characters and how much damage it could itself survive. Each also had more complex traits — for example, the ability to cast random spells, or to interact in peculiar ways with specific treasures it collected along the way, or to strengthen comrades in some quantifiable way. The game was too complicated to know with certainty its optimal moves. It required skill, but also luck. It required him to estimate probabilities, but also to guess. This was important; Sam didn’t care for games, like chess, where the players controlled everything and the best move was in theory perfectly calculable. Chess he’d have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly! Or almost anything — so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they’d been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

“Yuuuuuup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour had just said. His dwarf platoon, to which he’d added a princess or two, was defending the Hoard Dragon. At the same time, it was attacking its new foe, his opponent’s hero, a fat white penguin named Wonder Waddle. A dwarf named Crafty assaulted a sad-looking wimp called the Lonely Prince. Sleeping Princess wiped out the Labyrinth Minotaur. A sleeping maiden awakened to cast a spell that caused a dying character to turn into three arbitrarily generated living ones. So much was happening all at once! It would have been impossible for him to follow the action, even if that were all he was following.

“Yuuuuuuuuup,” said Sam. The noises the woman was making were still entirely ceremonial. No real content here. But each of Sam’s yups was warmer, more animated, than the last. And she was clearly warming to him. Everyone did these days. When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything. Their desire freed you up from having to pay attention to them, which was good, because Sam had only so much attention to give. Another battle was about to begin. As the seconds ticked down, he hastily selected a new army of killer trees and dwarves. At the same time, he pulled up a document: the notes Natalie had created for this very meeting. Sam now looked them over for the first time. Anna Wintour was definitely the editor of Vogue magazine.

“That’s interesting,” he said, as the battle commenced. Again, it was over in seconds. Already the Hoard Dragon was in trouble. Its health number was declining faster than the competition’s. A lot of the heroes were front-loaded; the Hoard Dragon was one of the rare ones that acquired its special powers only later in its life. The way to play the Hoard Dragon was to buy treasures that paid off more for it than for any other hero — but the payoff came way down the road, like eight battles later. In the meantime, you were diverting resources from the battle at hand. Sam didn’t need to win these early battles. He just needed to keep the Hoard Dragon alive long enough to enjoy the future gargantuan payoffs from the treasures he was accumulating. Anna Wintour was making that difficult. She wanted so much attention! And she was arriving at the reason for the call: the Met Gala. Organized by Vogue magazine. But rather than simply explain it to him and leave him in peace, she asked Sam what he knew about it.

Sam shifted in his chair. From his wrinkled cargo shorts he pulled his ChapStick. He twiddled it. Valuable seconds ticked away. Finally, he hit a button. The Hoard Dragon vanished, and Anna Wintour reappeared. Curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her.

“I don’t know as much about your industry as obviously you do,” he said, cautiously. “I know some of the public information, but I don’t know much of the behind-the-scenes information.” Some information. Strictly speaking, that was true: Sam knew some information. He knew that the Met Gala was a party. Attended by celebrities. Beyond that, he didn’t know much. For example, he could not have told you if the “Met” was the Metropolitan Opera or the Metropolitan Museum or, for that matter, the Metropolitan Police.

Anna Wintour was clearly used to this situation. To Sam’s great relief, she now began to explain the thing. The moment she opened her mouth, Sam switched out her face for a page from Wikipedia:

“Interesting!” said Sam. “That’s super interesting.” But even as he expressed this interest, he pressed a button that caused the Wikipedia page to vanish. In its place appeared an enormous golden tomahawk. The Hoard Dragon was hanging by a thread. Another battle was about to begin, against a character named Peter Pants. Peter Pants was the opposite of the Hoard Dragon. Peter Pants was a make-or-break character whose powers dwindled over time. Peter Pants was all about killing you quickly. Peter Pants might finish off the Hoard Dragon in a single battle. Sam had only a few seconds to organize his fighting force. He needed to focus. Anna Wintour was making that impossible.

“Yuuuup,” said Sam.

Anna Wintour now said she wanted to hear more about what FTX had done, giving-money-away-wise. Compelled to speak, Sam allowed her face to return to his computer screen. “We’ve done sponsorship deals with some places,” he said. “But it’s somewhat of an accident what we jumped into first. We really try to look hard at what partnerships would be most impactful. That’s why we’ve partnered with Tom and Gisele.” Partnered. Again, strictly true. It didn’t capture the spirit of the relationship. Sam had agreed to pay Tom Brady $55 million, and his then-wife, Gisele Bündchen, another $19.8 million, for 20 hours of their time each, over the next three years. Sam was paying people more money per minute than anyone had ever paid them to do anything in their entire lives. He’d paid Larry David $10 million to create a 60-second ad — over and above the $25 million the ad cost to produce and air during the Super Bowl — which Sam had watched just the day before. It was a great ad.

The Hoard Dragon was dying.

Sam might not have been entirely sure what the Met Gala was, or exactly what role he might play in it, but he could sense what Anna Wintour was after. She didn’t want only his money; she wanted him. Present, on her Met Gala red carpet, beside her, creating buzz. Sam also understood what he might get in return for his sacrifice: women. Or, rather, access to the female crypto speculator. FTX had spent vast sums to capture the minds of men. Fashion, to Sam’s way of thinking, occupied roughly the same place in the female imagination that sports did in the male imagination. He’d asked some marketing people for a list of things he might do in fashion to appeal to women. The Met Gala was on the list. And so here he was, on a Zoom call with Anna Wintour herself, who now seemed to be hinting that Sam might pay for the entire shindig.

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Sam, but his mind was elsewhere. The Hoard Dragon was dead. Anna Wintour had killed it. What to do? He made a halfhearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero but then changed his mind and shut the game down. He could often occupy two worlds at once and win in both. In this case he clearly stood no chance of winning in one world unless he paid less attention in the other. And this woman somehow had acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities to multitask. For now she was asking him not only for his money and his time. She wanted to know all about his political activities.

“My mom is working full time on the effectiveness of political campaign donations, and my brother is in D.C. with policymakers,” Sam said, returning Anna Wintour’s face to his laptop. “We’re doing a decent amount to see just how hard we can make it to steal an election. It’s sad that’s the forum we have to fight in, but it is.”

For a surprisingly long time, Sam’s spending on American elections had flown under the radar. Back in 2020, he’d sent $5.2 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign without anyone asking or even thanking him for it. He was Biden’s second- or third-biggest donor, and yet the campaign had never even bothered to call him. Since then, Sam had tossed tens of millions more dollars at 100 different candidates and political action committees, in ways that made his identity difficult to detect. It was yet another game — How to Influence American Politics — that he was learning by doing, and it was pretty fun, especially when you had the special power of invisibility. But then he “fucked up,” as he put it. He let it slip in some interview that he was thinking of hurling a billion dollars into the next presidential election. That remark would awaken the beast. And now Anna Wintour was professing her love for Pete Buttigieg. She was asking where, exactly, Sam planned to be in the next few weeks. To talk more about Pete Buttigieg.

“I certainly would love an introduction,” said Sam. “He’s someone who I’d love to see as president.” If he thought that would satisfy Anna Wintour, he was wrong. She wanted to nail down a place in the real world where Sam might be, and a time he might be there.

“I’m in the Bahamas 60 percent of the time,” said Sam, neatly evading the question. “I’m in D.C. some. For better or worse, my job is now 30 percent telling the regulators about what regulation should look like for crypto in the United States.” His bare left leg now curled under his bottom on the hotel desk chair; his right heel, encased in a white athletic sock, bounced up and down off the hotel carpet. He looked less like a crypto tycoon than a first-grader who needed to pee. But now Anna Wintour was talking again, thank God. Liberated, he scrolled through his Twitter feed. Two nights earlier, Sam had been introduced to Katy Perry. Katy Perry had wanted to know all about crypto. Now she was posting on Instagram: “im quitting music and becoming an intern for @ftx_official ok .”

Anna Wintour’s tone was changing. She had gotten what she came for and was now warmly ending the conversation. To be free of her, all Sam needed to do was make his usual sounds of total agreement with whatever she said.

Yup.

Awesome!

That makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, I would love to!

See ya!

With that, Sam hit a button and Anna Wintour was gone for good.

With the understandable impression that Sam Bankman-Fried, the most openhanded billionaire ever to have walked the Earth, had agreed to be her special guest at the Met Gala. That Sam might even pay for the entire thing. Sam, for his part, hadn’t really thought about it. He’d not even begun to do his Met Gala math. “I would have to think hard if this is a thing I want to go to,” he said, as he stowed his laptop in his backpack with his spare underwear and headed for the door of his Los Angeles hotel room, on his way back to the Bahamas.

“I would certainly be out of place there. It’s going to be a difficult needle to thread.”

In the ensuing weeks, Sam gave Anna Wintour’s people no reason to think he was doing anything but threading needles. FTX’s marketing people sounded out Louis Vuitton about creating a red-carpet-worthy version of Sam’s T-shirt-and-cargo-shorts look. Other FTX employees, perhaps hedging the company’s bets, paid Tom Ford to design a more conventional outfit, complete with $65,000 cuff links. Behind the scenes, wheels spun and gears ground but Sam himself never really engaged with the process, or even said what was on his mind. He viewed the entire list of fashion plays dreamed up by the FTX marketing people with suspicion. “I have no idea which of these things matters and which doesn’t,” he said. “It’s not clear that there is any way to know.”

His whole life, as far back as he could remember, he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives. “You start by making decisions on who you are going to be with based on how they look,” he said. “Then, because of that, you make bad choices about religion and food and everything else. Then you are just rolling the dice on who you are going to be.”

Very briefly, Sam set aside his disdain for the fashion industry and tried to do some math. Four billion women on the planet. Let’s say one in a thousand of them pays attention to the Met Gala. Let’s say one in a hundred of those gets interested in FTX … But it felt like trying to comb his hair when he had chewing gum stuck in it. His mind couldn’t even really get past the need for him to change out of his cargo shorts. And yet he allowed the decision to just sit there, festering, for months. The Met Gala would not occur until May 2. In Sam’s mind he had until roughly the night of May 1 before he had to tell Natalie what he planned to do.

Natalie was prepared for Anna Wintour’s people to be disappointed when she told them that Sam wouldn’t be there. It was their outrage that surprised her. “They called and shouted and said Sam will never set foot in fashion again!” said Natalie. So much for pulling more women into crypto. Natalie didn’t understand why the Met Gala was such a big deal. Sam’s last-minute decision not to go would not create anything like the havoc caused by some of his other internal calculations. CEOs had flown to the Bahamas under the mistaken impression that Sam had agreed to buy their companies. The World Economic Forum had to scramble to fill a stage and cancel media interviews after Sam decided, the night before he was meant to deliver a big speech in Davos, not to. Sam had failed to fly to Dubai to give the keynote at Time magazine’s party for the world’s 100 Most Influential People, even after Time had named him to their list and flattered him in print. “In a crypto landscape ridden with scams, hedonism, and greed, Bankman-Fried offers a kinder and more impactful vision brought forth by the nascent technology,” Time had written, the week before Sam stiffed them. Tyra Banks and will.i.am and all the rest of the world’s other most influential people were treated to hastily prepared remarks delivered by a not entirely sober FTX employee named Adam Jacobs, who was bewildered to be standing in for Sam. “I’m like, What is the head of payments doing giving this speech?” said Jacobs. “Why am I drinking with will.i.am?”

But the people at Time magazine hadn’t made a stink. No one except Anna Wintour’s people did: The general rule of life as late as May 2, 2022, was that Sam got to be Sam. It didn’t cross Natalie’s mind to feel even a tiny bit irritated with Sam. She could never be upset with him for the mess he left for her to clean up, because she knew that he never intended to make a mess. She could even forgive people who called to scream at her about Sam. If she herself didn’t fully understand Sam, how could anyone?

A few months later, toward the end of July 2022, I met Sam beside the tarmac of a private airfield in Northern California. As usual, he was late. When he finally arrived, he didn’t so much step as tumble out of the back of a black car. Instead of a suitcase, he carried what appeared to be a small pile of old laundry.

As he drew closer, I saw that it was a blue suit and a button-down Brooks Brothers shirt. “This is my D.C. suit,” he said, almost apologetically. “Normally I leave it in D.C.” Six hours in the future he was meant to have dinner with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom he’d never met. He’d been briefed that McConnell would be offended if he arrived in shorts. “McConnell really cares about what you wear,” said Sam, as he walked up the steps of the private plane and plopped the suit ball onto a spare seat. “Also, you need to call him ‘Leader.’ Or ‘Leader McConnell’ or ‘Mister Leader.’ I rehearsed it to make sure I didn’t fuck it up. Especially since it’s so tempting to say ‘Dear Leader.’ ”

I eyed the ball of clothes. Its wrinkles were not new and shallow but old and deep, reversible only with time and effort. It was hard to see how these clothes would be of any use in this situation.

“Do you have a belt?” I asked.

“I do not have a belt,” he said, as he reached into a basket of vegan snacks, grabbed a sack of popcorn, and dropped into his seat.

“Shoes?”

“Uh, no shoes,” he said.

It was as if he’d only received a single explicit instruction: “Bring a suit.” Whoever had sent it had neglected to add, “Make sure it’s wearable and that you have whatever else you need to satisfy Mitch McConnell’s need for his dinner companions to appear formally dressed,” and so Sam had not bothered to consider what else might be needed for a suit if it were to be successfully worn. He did this kind of thing a lot. Seven months earlier, he’d testified about crypto regulation before the House Financial Services Committee. Someone snapped a close-up of his feet under the table: the laces of his new dress shoes were still swaddled and gathered off to one side, as they come in the box. Someone must have handed him the shoes and said, without further instruction, “You should put these on.”

At any rate, this one item set Sam’s trips to Washington apart from all the other trips he took. Only to D.C. did he carry a suit: The stakes justified the sacrifice. In recent decades, the laws in the United States had been loosened so that people and even corporations could donate effectively unlimited sums of money to political campaigns and super PACs, without the larger American public being able to see exactly what they were doing, or why. What surprised Sam, once he himself had unlimited sums of money, was how slowly rich people and corporations had adapted to their new political environment. The U.S. government exerted massive influence on virtually everything under the sun and maybe even a few things over it. In a single four-year term, a president, working with Congress, directed roughly $15 trillion in spending. And yet in 2016, the sum total of spending by all candidates on races for the presidency and Congress came to a mere $6.5 billion. “It just seems like there isn’t enough money in politics,” said Sam. “People are underdoing it. The weird thing is that Warren Buffett isn’t giving $2 billion a year.”

Inside U.S. politics, Sam was creating yet another money puzzle: Even after he’d poured billions into various venture capital investments, he was willing to spend hundreds of millions more to influence public policy. His political spending was distributed sloppily. Some of it went to support his narrow business interests: a few million dollars donated to politicians and interest groups willing to push for legislation that would allow Americans to trade the crypto contracts on FTX inside the United States that foreigners did on FTX outside of it. It struck him as yet another strange and senseless feature of the grown-up world that the United States, which was otherwise willing to subject its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to state lotteries and casinos and other games of chance in which the odds were stacked against them, made an exception for securities, or anything that might be construed as securities. But those were the rules of this new game, and Sam had decided, with some doubts about their tractability, to try to change them — rather than do what the other crypto exchanges were doing, which was simply to ignore them.

Oddly, the money he gave to people to make it easier for him to make even more money was the easiest money for others to see. All of it without a whole lot of trouble could be traced back to Sam, or FTX or crypto interest groups. It was the remaining money — the money that had little to do with his own narrow financial interests — that was opaque. His attempts to change the world as he thought the world needed to be changed had little to do with his business. But to be effective, he had to hide what he was doing, lest others assume that the point of giving was to shape crypto legislation. In some not unreasonable minds, “crypto” was synonymous with “criminal.” “The problem was that if it were disclosed, everyone would assume that it was crypto money,” he said. Crypto money was harder to give away than it should have been, in Sam’s opinion. Politicians and interest groups didn’t always like the look of accepting it, even if they weren’t quite sure what that look was. “There isn’t anything concrete there,” said Sam. “They’re just uncomfortable.” Their discomfort could lead to strange outcomes. “We had one group say, ‘You know, we really appreciate this, but it wouldn’t be good for me to take money from FTX, so I can’t — besides, I have found another source of funding.’ That other source of funding was Gabe, my brother.”

Along with his brother, Sam had looked at the world and decided that two causes made more sense to address with his money than any of the others. And that a lot of the money needed to be sneaky.

Their first, less sneaky initiative was pandemic prevention. On the list of existential risks to humanity, pandemics occupied a special place. Unlike, say, with an asteroid strike, the threat felt real, and politicians could be persuaded to take it seriously. Unlike, say, with climate change, hardly anyone was talking or thinking seriously about how to address the problem — even after a million Americans had just died from a new pathogen. Unlike, say, in preventing a war on humanity by artificial intelligence, there were some obvious, though expensive, things to do to mitigate the risk. For instance, someone really did need to take the lead in the creation of a global system of disease prediction, one that resembled the global system of weather prediction. Sam guessed that it would take $100 billion, which put it beyond his reach. “If it were 10 times smaller, it’s possible I could just do it myself,” he said. “If FTX winds up six times bigger than we are today, we’d have to re-compute that.” He might not have the money right now to do it himself, but he did have the money to persuade the U.S. government to do it. This very issue was the stated, though not perhaps the biggest, reason for his dinner with Mitch McConnell: to discuss an effort to allocate $10 billion for pandemic response to an entity inside the Department of Health and Human Services called the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. McConnell was a Republican and in theory hostile to big government expenditures. But Sam had already decided that these politicians were far more complex devices than their tribal identities might suggest. “He’s a polio survivor,” said Sam. “And we think he’s interested.”

The second initiative would be largely steered by Mitch McConnell, or friends of Mitch McConnell. So that the disguise would be legal, Sam and McConnell would not talk about how the money for that initiative would be used. But the project was very much the subtext of the dinner Sam was headed to, because in McConnell, Sam had found someone as interested as he was in another existential threat to humanity: Donald Trump. Trump’s assault on the government, and on the integrity of U.S. elections, belonged, to Sam’s way of thinking, on the same list as pandemics and artificial intelligence and climate change. Across the land, Republican primaries were littered with candidates who were willing to behave as if the presidential election had been stolen from Trump. They faced candidates who were forced to pay lip service to the idea. McConnell’s people had already figured out which was which, and McConnell was intent on defeating the former. “He’s already done the work,” said Sam. The work, he added, was to distinguish “people who would actually try to govern versus people who would undermine the government.”

At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15 million to $30 million to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the Senate races. On a separate front, he explained to me, as the plane descended into Washington, he was exploring the legality of paying Donald Trump himself not to run for president. His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5 billion. Or so Sam was told by his team.

It was interesting, especially in retrospect, how well suited Sam’s mind was to understanding Donald Trump. At that moment, his team was using their mysterious line of communication into the Trump camp to seed Trump’s mind with an idea. In Missouri, a rabid Trumper named Eric Greitens was in what looked like a close race with a less enthusiastic Trumper named Eric Schmitt. Schmitt wanted to govern; Greitens wanted to tear things down. Trump had not yet weighed in on the race, and the fear was that his endorsement might swing the election to Greitens. Sam’s team had come up with an idea — which, Sam claimed, was just then making its way to Trump himself. The idea was to persuade Trump to come out and say “I’m for Eric!” without specifying which Eric he was for. After all, Trump didn’t actually care who won. All he cared about was that he would be seen to have backed the winner. If he said he was for Eric, he’d get the credit for whichever Eric won. “I’m for Eric!” would attract even more attention to Trump than a more specific endorsement, and the attention is all Trump cared about in the end. “It’s very Trump,” said Sam. “It’d become a meme.”

As he said that, he tossed popcorn in his mouth, in a herky-jerky motion that resembled a clumsy layup. He was shooting around 60 percent, and the popcorn was flying everywhere. He’d failed to catch a dish of warm nuts as they’d hurtled past him during takeoff, and they too were still scattered all around him. As he’d ordered the political world in his mind, he’d created chaos in the space he inhabited. Finally we landed, and he ran to his dinner, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.