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''I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. "One hundred and fifty billion dollars," he finally said-though he added that he had use for "infinity dollars"...''

Sam Bankman-Fried wasn''t just rich. Before he turned thirty he''d become the world''s youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.

Then it all fell apart.

Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?

Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted ''thinking machine'', and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.

©2023 Michael Lewis (P)2023 Penguin Audio