SBF

Prologue

One of the things I've learned as a journalist is something I can't quite explain, even really to myself. It's a thing I know, but putting it in words is harder.

But it's something like this: Sometimes I will try to report a story, based on the fact that I know something has happened. What I want to know is the how and why of that event.

The thing, the happening that broke into public view, is maybe 5 or 10 percent of the story. And from that little piece, I think I know two or three ways that it could possibly be explained. It doesn't seem like it could be explained by anything else.

But then you learn maybe 30 or 50 percent of the story. You're still not all the way there, but you realize that there was so much that you just couldn't see when you only had 5 to 10 percent. It looks now like you were blind then.

That's not the part that's hard to explain.

This is: Now that you know more than you knew then, you also can't even identify with yourself and the way you once saw it. It's hard to even see how you ever thought those explanations could be right. Maybe you can't even remember them. That simplicity slips from the set of possibilities.

So here's my point: this book is a reel of film from late 2022. It's an attempt to capture what we think we know about Sam Bankman‐Fried, the FTX conglomerate, and the crypto industry, up through to the point of his indictment, arrest, and extradition back to the US, when facts were still fuzzy and emotions were running hot.

Honestly, ...