I first heard about Sam Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021 from a friend who wanted me to help him figure out who he was. My friend was about to close a deal with Sam that would bind their fates, through an exchange of shares in each other’s companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He remained uneasy. He thought he understood FTX, the crypto exchange that Sam had built, but he didn’t have as good a feel for Sam himself. He’d asked around about Sam and discovered that, as little as he felt he really knew him, other people, even people who had invested millions of dollars in Sam’s company, knew even less.
