How The Winklevoss Twins Lost A Billion Dollars

In just a few years, Sam Bankman-Fried went from being a relative nobody to the architect of a cryptocurrency empire whose net worth neared $30 billion. But, even quicker than his empire burst onto the scene, it crumbled in November 2022 with the news that his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had lost nearly $10 billion of its clients’ money. In Going Infinite (2023), financial journalist Michael Lewis provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Bankman-Fried’s meteoric rise and fall. And although Bankman-Fried has been convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, Lewis suggests that the case against Bankman-Fried is less damning than outsiders believe.

In this guide, we’ll break down Going Infinite into three main parts, first examining Lewis’s portrayal of the enigmatic Bankman-Fried himself before proceeding to the rise and precipitous collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. We’ll also discuss alternative accounts of Bankman-Fried’s actions at FTX and dive deeper into the nature of cryptocurrency that lay at the heart of FTX.

In When Genius Failed, financial journalist Roger Lowenstein explores the spectacular rise and catastrophic 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Lowenstein explains how LTCM, initially hailed as a financial genius, used complex mathematical models and sophisticated trading strategies to generate massive profits. The fund's founders and managers believed that they’d discovered a way to eliminate or at least greatly minimize market risk through their strategies. Their overconfidence in their models ultimately led them to make highly leveraged—that is, debt-financed—bets on various financial instruments.

In this guide, we’ll explore the history of LTCM, how its models operated, how it achieved such dizzying success, and how it suffered such a crushing and ignominious fall. Throughout the guide, we’ll supplement Lowenstein’s account with commentary from other financial experts and analysts, including commentators who wrote after the book’s initial publication in 2000—adding insights to the LTCM story in light of subsequent events.