Review

Comment

Morality

23 November 2023

7 min read

Sam Bankman-Fried: doing the math on morality

The calculated character and philanthropy of crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried is analysed by Krish Kandiah, who finds it doesn’t to add up.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Sam Bankman-Fried at a crypto-conference, 2021.

Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is quite the compelling read.

For a start Lewis has an incredible ability to explain complex economic and business scenarios in a way that is not only accessible, but also gripping. It is no wonder his previous books have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Lewis also has a knack for finding the humanity in almost any given situation. Whether he is writing about the system for picking a world-beating baseball team, the global economic crisis or, in this case, the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency exchange, he delves deep into the characters at the heart of the stories, exposing their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and values.

The publication of Going Infinite last month also coincided with Bankman-Fried’s real time court case, ending in a guilty verdict for, in the words of US attorney Damian Williams, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

This fraud centred on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. It emerged as one of the largest in the world with billions in deposits. All helping Bankman-Fried, aged just 29, to become recognised by Forbes magazine as the 41st richest American.

For all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other.

My personal interest in the man behind the fraud was shaped by three things. Firstly, as an adoptive and foster parent of two children who are on the autistic spectrum, I was interested in what Lewis would say about the common speculation that Bankman-Fried is also on the autistic spectrum.

I was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s philosophical approach to philanthropy and how Lewis would present the problems with the movement known as Effective Altruism.

Finally, I was interested in just to what extent Bankman-Fried’s commitment to mathematical algorithms overshadowed his moral awareness, given that it may well ultimately result in a sentence of 100 years behind bars.

Autism

Lewis invites us into as much of the inner world of Bankman-Fried as he can. He writes about his loneliness in childhood and his struggles with social conventions, for example. One particularly powerful moment is when we are allowed to eavesdrop on a video call with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Bankman-Fried cannot do the call without simultaneously playing a video game. He doesn’t want to see Ms Wintour’s face while she is speaking and only looks at her when he is speaking.

While Lewis readily points to traits that are commonly associated with people on the autistic spectrum – Bankman-Fried’s struggle to comply with social norms and difficulties understanding facial expressions, for example – he avoids using the term “autism”.

It seems that Bankman-Fried himself is aware of his neurodivergent traits and is not afraid to talk about the way they impact his emotional and existential intelligence.

At one point he writes to his girlfriend:

“I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"

He went on to say:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul”

I found statements like these hard to read, but insightful. As a culture we are growing in our understanding and appreciation of a range of areas of diversity, however this has yet to be robustly applied to enable both widespread social acceptance and self-acceptance. The fact that Lewis chooses not to use the term autism may be a symptom of this.

Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a very visible member of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is a fascinating philosophical approach to philanthropy which challenges individuals to consider their lives in terms of maximising their resources for the benefit of the world. Bankman-Fried’s answer to the question “How can I do most good with my life?” was to plan to earn a very large sum of money, ideally an infinite sum of money, that could then be used to help solve huge global issues such as the threat of nuclear war or another global pandemic.

There are many criticisms of the EA movement, and, Lewis explores several of them during the course of the book. Perhaps most obviously, for all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other. In fact, there was a major falling out between the effective altruists at his first company Alameda Research where half of the employees left because of his leadership style. Charity, it seems, did not begin at home.
It is also unclear how much money Bankman-Fried actually gave away to philanthropic causes. And it is alleged that just a month after FTX collapsed, the company even began trying to claw back the charitable donations it made. According to direct messages on X with journalist Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically-driven approach was "mostly a front".

"Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known," he wrote to Piper, "and some of its most beloved people are basically shams."

The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is uncertain whether Bankman-Fried had good intentions at all or whether the lure of billions of dollars became so irresistible that whatever virtue once existed was sacrificed to vice.

There was another dark side to Bankman-Fried’s EA philosophy. He seemed to be fascinated by the question of just how far he could go in his calculations of trade-offs and risks in the supposed cause of saving the future of humanity? What was the highest risk he would take? What boundaries would he cross for financial gain? What would need to be sacrificed on the way? The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

Automatism

Sam Bankman-Fried was not afraid to be honest about his struggles to process and express empathy in socially acceptable ways. He once said:

"There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

However, what he seemed to struggle with in empathy, he apparently tried to make up for in logic. The following example is helpful.

Lewis records that Bankman-Fried saw Donald Trump as an “existential risk” to democracy and good governance and decided the best way to remove the threat was to offer to pay him not to run for president—an idea Trump was reportedly open to.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team,” Lewis writes.

I have some admiration for Bankman-Fried’s out-of-the-box thinking. He was speaking Trump’s language. He was trying to save the world. He was trying to solve a problem. Logically it was sound. But his $5,000,000,000 calculation was fundamentally flawed. It took no account of democratic values, of the consequences of feeding an ‘existential threat’ billions of dollars, or the illegality of bribery and corruption on that scale.

The same miscalculation haunts the EA movement. While earning infinite amounts of money to save the world or prevent the climate emergency sounds logical, it fails to factor in the dark side of humanity: greed, lust, pride or gluttony, or whichever vice stopped Bankman-Fried from giving away his promised sizeable sum of money and led him rather to committing one of the largest frauds in history. The tech-bro altruistic movement also doesn’t factor in the bright side of humanity: compassion, humility, generosity, sacrifice. It doesn’t account for the human things that keep us going as we pursue justice - proximity to the people we are serving, faith or beauty.

The verdict against Bankman-Fried shows us that hard logic, like lofty ideals, is not enough to protect us from the bad we might do or propel us unswervingly towards the good we should do. The equations are flawed. We are more than machines. We are not social or biological robots. Our emotions and reactions can never be completely predictable or automatic because we are human beings, each of us with our unique strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, this is what I liked about Lewis’ book – his portrayal of Sam Bankman-Fried not in terms of how much money he made, or how many years he will spend behind bars, not as Crypto-King or Lord of Frauds, but as a uniquely talented and flawed individual who wrestles with some of the biggest existential paradoxes, and who is still, by the way, only 31 years old.

Article

Comment

Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.