"Late in the book, you talk about trying to find where the lost billions of FTX customer deposits, before concluding that most of it wasn't actually lost in the first place: "Where did all that money go? The answer? Nowhere. It was still there." Can you explain this to me?

If we are now at $8.6 billion in customer deposits lost, Mr. John Ray [who was brought in as FTX CEO after its collapse] has actually collected, as he claims, $7.3 billion of liquid assets. And he has not sold a lot of the VC [venture capital] portfolios. I've interviewed a couple traders who actually think they might get 100 cents on the dollar. I think this is a really interesting thing that has not gotten enough attention: how much of the money is still there.

I asked a woman who'd been a prosecutor who is now a defense attorney: What if they find all the money? Like, what if it turns out that creditors get 100 cents back on the dollar, and there are no victims?

And she said: `It doesn't matter. As a legal matter, he will be treated as if he lost the money that they thought he lost when they charged him.' And I don't really understand that. It does seem to me that there is a difference between having moved the money into the wrong place and it's still there in some form, versus having moved the money into an account into Uzbekistan, and you're hiding it.

Clearly, they should not have had customer money in Alameda. That's insane. They clearly should have subjected Alameda to the risk engine. That's insane. But there is a question of the role of this catastrophic sloppiness that seems to follow Sam Bankman-Fried wherever he goes."

Michael Lewis, the son of a lawyer, is a Princeton graduate. Art history, but still. And yet he claims, "I don't really understand that." This is not difficult to understand. It's the same black letter law that existed when he wrote Liar's Poker and for 100 years before. Mail/wire fraud does not require that the perpetrator actually succeed in defrauding anyone. It's quite clear SBF intended to tell people one thing and meanwhile do another. He intended to lie. And he did this to raise money.

The purpose for which he was raising money, e.g., to purchase private jets and high end real estate in order to effectively and altruistically "save" the rest of the world, is irrelevant.

His brother was tasked with purchasing a small island nation that the Bankman-Frieds could escape to when civilisation collapsed. There is nothing altruistic about that.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/21/ftx-sues-fo...

"Many articles have been written accusing Sam Bankman-Fried of lying repeatedly. Do you believe Sam is a serial liar?

I think he's a serial withholder. Unless I asked exactly the right question, I did not get the full picture. Talking to him was like trying to play a game of Battleship. If you guessed A4 and the battleship was on A4, he would say, `yes.' But if you guessed A5, he wouldn't tell you."

SBF sounds like a great fiduciary.

"When I got to the justice system, which is the last system he's collided with, I thought, this material belongs in a sequel, rather than in this book. This book ends with a collapse of his business and reputation and all that. So the subsequent thing feels like a separate story.

Why am I not surprised. Lewis will never write that book.

It feels like Lewis believes that corruption is the future and anyone who believes otherwise will be proven wrong. Maybe, but who wants that future.

Lewis calls his critics "a mob" yet if social media exploded with people emotionally hyping his book, he would not call that "a mob".