Cross a brilliant, but autistic young man with one of the new religions of modernity, and you get a financial implosion. FTX’s bankruptcy was, of course, a scandal in the world of cryptocurrency, but the great merit of Michael Lewis’s new book, Going Infinite, is to show how the disaster was also the story of a cult that appeals to the Mensa crowd. The moral of the story, therefore, is not so much legal—the need for greater regulation of crypto—as cultural: the need for humanistic education to direct STEM capacities and for a CEO’s keen judgment to be valued as much as his high IQ.

Lewis’s tale benefited from two bits of great good fortune. First, he gained personal access to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) thanks to a friend’s casual request to check him out to see if the head of FTX was trustworthy. He then followed SBF around, thinking that he was an interesting character at the heart of the emerging crypto industry. But Lewis admits that he had become worried that his account of his time with SBF would lack resonance because it would simply reel off one success after another. There would be Act I about SBF’s rise, Act II about FTX’s rise, but where we would be Act III? Lewis got his Act III.

Act I: Rise of SBF

SBF is the son of two Stanford law professors, both of whom specialize in utilitarian accounts of law. Utilitarianism is a moral theory that argues that we should judge our actions by their consequences and choose those with the best results. SBF embraced these theories from his earliest days. Unfortunately, his experience of the world—something that should always inform and chasten our theories—was limited because of his autism. He could not identify to Lewis any close friend from his school days. Even SBF’s younger brother said he had no more to do with SBF than with a “tenant” who happened to reside in the same house.

SBF resolutely rejected the way most smart introverts get their information about how to navigate the real world—through immersion in novels and history. He thought reading was a waste of time and Shakespeare was a poseur, an assessment he “proved” by a Bayesian analysis focused on the fact that there were millions of writers who came after the bard and lived in more prosperous circumstances, making it likely that many millions were far better. What SBF of course missed (besides the glories of Shakespeare) is that a great literary genius in the early modern world writing in a still comprehensible English has more opportunity to create and thus dominate subsequent literary culture. All philosophy has been said to be a footnote to Plato, not because he was the most brilliant philosopher, but because he was plenty smart and came first.

Despite questionable literary opinions, SBF was a wizard at numbers and probability, eventually majoring in physics at MIT. Along the way, he became infatuated with the idea of Effective Altruism—the notion that one should act based on calculations of how to benefit the most people to the greatest extent possible. What separates it from most forms of utilitarianism is its focus on benefiting others with whom one has no connection—because most people in the most miserable conditions are remote from those schooled in Effective Altruism’s tenets. As SBF admitted, “Not being super close to that many particular people made it more natural to care not about anyone in particular but about everyone.”

In my view, the story is the unfolding of the disaster that flows from a fantastic philosophy where duties to people right in front of one’s eyes are neglected in favor of altruism toward unknown strangers. SBF resembles Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House who disregards her husband and children in favor of schemes for helping those in distant nations. But SBF’s greater talent allowed his indifference to have far graver consequences.

Act II: Rise of FTX

Gifted with mathematical talent and imbued with his new philosophy, SBF headed to Wall Street where he could make the most money to give away. He joined Jane Street Capital, a firm that made most of its money through high-speed arbitrage in which traders execute millions of trades in markets with slightly different prices for the same security. SBF excelled there because he was an expert in quickly and accurately assigning probabilities of profit to potential scores. But he left soon to found his own firm.

Lewis’s explanation for the exit was that SBF saw greater opportunities for arbitrage in the fledgling market, but it is also clear that he was not going to climb the hierarchy at Jane Street. Even among a crowd of mathematical geeks, SBF stood out for his lack of social grace and acumen, needlessly alienating and humiliating co-workers to win personal side bets. He ridiculed investment bankers at places like Morgan Stanley because they had lower IQs, not recognizing that they also may have better judgment than he, perhaps honed from reading a lot of stories.

SBF then started his own firm, Alameda Research, with capital raised from a group of Effective Altruists who saw the opportunity to make money to do good. Their representatives were part of his management committee, which soon soured on SBF. SBF took huge risks that he thought were likely to lead to high rewards. Yet he was irresponsible. For instance, after promising to monitor a computational algorithm that would make arbitrage trades in crypto automatically, he promptly fell asleep.

As a result, the management team resigned, and most of the Effective Altruists withdrew their money. Fortunately for SBF, however, he’d made enough money to begin a new enterprise, FTX, in addition to Alameda. Four early decisions led to his quick rise and fall. First, recognizing that arbitrage margins in crypto would be squeezed as competitors got into the business, SBF decided to set up an exchange where he could make money by facilitating crypto trades and holding this new kind of currency for traders, since most people do not know how to keep track of it by themselves. He was thus left in control of billions of dollars of other people’s money.

Second, at the highest levels of the company, he surrounded himself with other Effective Altruists on the theory that they would not steal crypto (which was easy to do), because they were committed to eventually giving away FTX’s profits to unknown, needy people. Unfortunately, that meant that, like SBF, they would not be overly concerned with legal duties to known, not-so-needy people, like customers or shareholders. These people, after all, could stand in the way of a big payout for the miserable. He and his acolytes were peculiarly unfit to be entrusted with any fiduciary responsibilities.

Third, SBF eventually made his girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, the head of Alameda. Their personal relationship made her very unlikely to challenge the unusual financial relationship between the two companies that allowed Alameda to go into the red in its accounts with the exchange. Lewis’s telling of the affair between an indifferent man and a needy, self-involved woman is alternately lightly amusing and deeply sad.

Finally, SBF moved its companies abroad—first to Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas—and thus avoided any United States regulation that might have prompted greater caution.

For a while, SBF minted money through these arrangements, and success led to global celebrity. Lewis captures the comic gold of SBF zooming with such figures as Anna Wintour, the head of Vogue. She wants SBF, who wears nothing but t-shirts and cargo shorts, to show up and finance the Metropolitan Museum Fashion Gala, a yearly charity event where all the fashionistas of New York dress up to be seen. But as Wintour is trying to use SBF, he is spending the time playing a video game on the side with periodic calculations of his own about whether the publicity gained will be worth it. To the fury of Wintour, he bails on the event the day before.

Act III: Fall

Hemingway’s famous dictum about how you go bankrupt (“Two ways—first, gradually, then suddenly”) sums up how SBF went bust—but of course, he had probably never read Hemingway. He had minted a crypto token to facilitate exchanges on FTX. When the token had value, it propped up the capital of his trading firm Alameda. But by the fall of 2022, the value of all cryptocurrencies crashed. A rival raised questions about the solvency of Alameda. That in turn made those who kept their cryptocurrency with FTX nervous, and they withdrew their money at an increasing rate. Within a few days, SBF had no choice but to sign his firm over to a receiver. He was arrested in the Bahamas a few weeks later in part for bilking customers. At the time of his arrest, he was on the phone, arguing with his mother about whether to begin scheduled congressional testimony with an expletive. He thought it was a great idea. Lewis was there to record his misjudgments to the very end.

Opponents of cryptocurrency have seized on FTX’s fall to argue that the innovation is inherently a fraud. But the causes of the failure were hardly unique to crypto. Runs on banks and exchanges have been occurring as long as there have been banks and exchanges. And the cause of the ruin—using customer funds for one’s own speculation as SBF allegedly used FTX’s funds to support his trading in Alameda—is the original sin of the financial world.

Going Infinite is a beautifully written book about a man who cares for neither beauty nor writing. But Lewis never discusses what to me is the most interesting lesson—one concerning technology and intelligence. As our world has become ever more dominated by computation, ambitious, high-IQ men have become ever more masters of our universe. Their talents are richly rewarded. But technology has not yet made man more reasonable or made intelligence a better substitute for wisdom and self-control. Great literature can do as much as anything to inculcate these virtues. It is an unending series of stories that teach enduring truths, like “know thyself” and “nothing too much,” that have been around since the ancient world. They cannot be dismissed on the notion that the many more clever thinkers since then must have devised better guides to life.