I think the book does give something as a friendly-ish portrayal of SBF. Archived Message
Posted by ghost_of_clt on March 28, 2024, 13:10:29, in reply to "Unfortunately, Lewis seems to have (willingly?) fallen for SBF's con in his profiling of the man"
Note that the book was two years or so of observation and interviews and then quickly the ending formed. (E: after that Oct 2023 article) Lewis has companion podcasts for the SBF trial, aftermath, and inevitably some introspection (or used his regular Against the Rules pod to dedicate for it) and had interviewers interview him (though maybe they could have been more critical, but he was asked what he got wrong) (it's Sam - he's very smart and clever and lacks norms) Previous Message https://newrepublic.com/article/175030/michael-lewiss-book-sam-bankman In the run-up to the publication of Going Infinite, in part because Lewis had already shared a stage for a chummy—some said fawning—interview with a pre-collapse SBF, and in part because Lewis appeared to suggest in an ill-considered 60 Minutes interview that Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm FTX was “a great real business” and that, bad as they were, the events leading to its collapse were not necessarily criminal (the trial will tell), there was speculation that Lewis had written an apologia of sorts for the now-despised figure. It was, after all, the formula that had made Michael Lewis himself a national celebrity, one of the great bestsellers of the age: to turn a quirky, iconoclastic, and even unlikeable figure into the real protagonist in a story of how they took on greater fools. And the circumstances of the book’s release, which was shadowed by rumors of hasty last-minute rewrites and copies not being made available to reviewers until the publication date, added to conjecture. Had Lewis been taken in by the con man? Was this Boswell too close to his Johnson? He has not written an apology, but he was taken in. “His judgment of other people,” Lewis writes of SBF, “was always far more acute than their judgment of him.” Like his employees, his marks, his dupes, his cheated counterparties, SBF’s biographer cast this figure—shambolic, often dirty, rude, condescending, wildly unpleasant, and, I am afraid to say, not evidently nearly as smart as everyone gave him credit for—as a once-in-a-generation-intellect, not because he was one but because he had to be. This boy, with neither affect nor depth, neither emotional intelligence nor intellectual insight, was a blank canvas on which to paint the image of a great mind that did not exist: a scammer and sociopath cast as neurodivergent genius. He was the worst possible thing for a biographer of real but limited talent: He was boring.
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Message Thread:
- Sam Bankman-Fried... - Throwsize March 28, 2024, 10:56:57
- seinfeldthatsashame.gif* - VIV March 28, 2024, 11:51:00
- good* - Tooldresser March 28, 2024, 11:05:16
- So he's not sorry for what he did, just sorry about what happened and that people feel let down? - doubledown March 28, 2024, 11:02:40
- got off easy but it's federal time so he'll spend 80% in jail* - suburbanmyth March 28, 2024, 10:59:46
- Hopefully he serves all of them but I doubt it.* - Warrin'_Illini March 28, 2024, 10:59:31
- 25 years - Sammich March 28, 2024, 10:58:54
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