Falling Out of Love with Michael Lewis: Complicated Demands of Business Writing

I just read a similar review: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/review-michael-lewiss-go...

> Far from providing an incisive inside view into a historic collapse that saw billions of dollars go up in flames at the expense of multitudes of people who were financially ruined, Lewis has still produced the hero story he originally set out to write. By the end of Lewis’s first ever conversation with Bankman-Fried, he writes: “I was totally sold”.

I'm just over half way through the Lewis book. I like it so far although I came in expecting the overly forgiving narrative. Its obvious the book was supposed to be a hero's journey. Just a scrappy team of misfits that changed the world.

The weird thing about it is how ftx was such a success almost immediately. The book doesn't go into it too much, but everything was amateur hour and not in a good way. Everyone they hired had no experience in their role. And it wasn't about doing things differently, it was just "why not"?

But can someone explain the success? They didn't have an edge or any new insight. Sbf didn't even really code or care much about it. And is the downturn just from the association with Alameda? In an alternate universe in which Alameda was seen as the albatros as it was and discarded, does ftx succeed?

There were some benefits from Alameda like holding ftx tokens and propping up the value. But the value wasn't just in the token. The team was the second largest exchange after Binance with a fraction of the employees (~300)

I'm past the part of the book where ftx gets crazy growth, which is stated as a given, so I won't get any answers there. But how did it happen?

> He was so good at finance that at his previous job at a hedge fund, he supervised its biggest day of losses in company history.

Small irrelevant detail, but nags me nonetheless. Jane Street is not a hedge fund. They don't remotely operate like one. They're a prop market making firm.

This is going to be controversial but having worked at tiny startups, I really don’t think SBF is atypical in his decision making. I think his fatal mistake was not realizing the scale he’s playing at and that you can’t keep doing these things when your company is the size of FTX.

It doesn’t help there’s strange personality traits mixed in that were exasperated by the easy money. But I honestly do buy the “reckless kid” narrative.

People also gloss over seven of the eight billion having been recovered. It doesn’t seem impossible that all the money gets returned. Part of this is luck, but maybe there is at-least some credence to the liquidity argument.

I’m in no way advocating for SBF but I don’t think Michael Lewis is wildly wrong.

This article captures so much of my disdain for Lewis’s kid glove treatment of SBF.

When I first heard of SBF, I found his plans to be the first trillionaire, and how he would deploy billions to save the world, it honestly sounded like narcissism. Like he was the one who was going to save the world. And this was before the scandal.

After FTX implosion, we see them living in a 38m luxury apartment on the ocean, he owns two jets, on and on. Sure he doesn’t wear a suit, he hardly lived like an EA espouses.

The way folks found it cute that he would play video games while conducting meetings or interviews? Everyone calling him a child when he is 30?

In person he must have some serious reality distorting field mojo.

The quote "history is written by the victors" seems relevant. If Lewis had released the book a year earlier the voices saying "look crypto!" would have been much louder and overwhelming. But, history moves so fast right now that SBF is no longer a victor but the villain. I'm also sad that Lewis can't back away from his work, but after all, he is writing books to sell them. I bet he made a good decision financially to release the book now rather than waiting a few years and write up what he recently learned. Another good quote my dad stole is "why ruin a good story with the truth."