SBF

Chapter 1I Want to Believe

I am drowning in Sam.

He's everywhere, and unlike any other CEO after a comparably colossal unwinding, he's not coming at me indirectly, via journalists searching out his history.

No, this deluge is him. He won't stop. It's as if he can't stop. I want to get the story of FTX down, but how can anyone discern it through all the noise that is him: that is Sam Bankman‐Fried? That is SBF. That nasally, excessively informed voice that just won't stop offering his version of events in his extra‐qualified statistically tinted mysticism.

These words are coming to you from somewhere around the halfway point of writing this book. It's December 1, 2022. Tonight, as my workday at Axios, the internet‐native news site, was ending, I was trying to make some time to do a little bit of research on companies that one of his companies, Alameda Research, has backed, but then I got a message on our Slack that SBF, the boy wonder who lost several billion dollars in crypto wealth, was doing a Twitter Spaces.

For those blessedly adrift from the gravity of Twitter, Spaces are where a few people can go online and talk with each other, no video, just voice, while dozens or hundreds or thousands of others just listen, interacting only with a few emoji. Spaces has become a big way for big accounts to broadcast. And SBF, since late November and here in early December 2022, was all about broadcasting.

This was after SBF had made a morning show appearance with George Stephanopoulous, ...