Opinion | Play it again, Sam: Inside Bankman-Fried’s last year in the crypto game

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.

This essay was adapted from “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” by Michael Lewis. It will be published Oct. 3 by W.W. Norton & Company. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. The audio version of “Going Infinite” was created by Audible and is reproduced with permission.

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.”