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

Identity

4 April 2025

6 min read

Identity is more than mere branding, ask WH Smith

It's not just nostalgia that's being generated by the retailer's demise

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

Cyclists and pedestrians pass in front of a WH Smith store front.

So, alas, no more WH Smith on the British High Street. Then, to add insult to injury, the chain of shops will be rebranded by the private equity firm, Modella Capital, as TG Jones. A move to ensure the stores retain “the same sense of family”.

Really?

I was surprised. Not by the news. We’ve seen so many once famous names disappear, another one is hardly noteworthy. But no, I was surprised by my reaction when I heard.

I’m not quite sure what the emotion was. It nestled somewhere between

“NO!”

and,

“They can’t be serious!”

Somewhere between warm-hearted nostalgia and gob-smacked incredulity.

I have loved Smith’s since forever. As a boy, in a small market town in Norfolk, the kiosk at our railway station was where I went to buy my Commando war story comics. As a teenager it was the music and video department I frequented. Then, newly married it was photo albums followed by all the school supplies of pencil cases and folders our growing family needed every August. Our memories exert a powerful influence on us.

But the nostalgia goes deeper than that. It is a British institution. WH Smith and Sons, as I originally knew it, began life in 1792 in a news vending shop established by Henry and Anna Smith in Little Grosvenor Street in London’s Mayfair.

Their grandson, William Henry (of the WH) joined the firm as a partner in 1846 and was responsible for their expansion through railway stations. Taking advantage of the boom in rail travel their first news stand was opened at Euston Station in 1848 by securing exclusive rights to operate with North Western Railways. This was swiftly followed with a similar deal with Midland Railways.

Across the years innovative entrepreneurship has been part of who they are. They pioneered wholesale warehouse distribution through their sites in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Dublin.

Then, along the way, in 1966 they introduced a 9-digit code to improve their book reference system. Eight years later their Standard Book Numbering (SBN) system had been universally adopted as the internationally recognised ISBN classification on the back cover of every published book.

Their company history also includes novel initiatives like a circulating library, a travel agency, the DIY chain Do It All, a 10-year ownership of Waterstones, satellite TV with their own sports channel in the mid-1980s, and more recently, in-store post offices and the online personalised greeting card brand, Funky Pigeon.

Smiths is a company that is deeply embedded in the life of our country. It’s deeply embedded in my life story too. Of course I’m going to feel nostalgic about it. But, do you know what, I can’t remember the last time I went into one of their iconic shops and actually bought something!

And that’s probably it, at least in retail. Any nostalgia on my part is, at most, only of the wistful variety.

As important as our personal history and heritage are in helping us understand ourselves, life is provisional, and our identity can change.

While the High Street shops do remain a going concern, it is their travel hub network in airports across the world that make the serious money and will retain the WH Smith branding. Hence, the change of name to TG Jones and the source of my “gob-smacked incredulity”.

Now it is easy to understand how a move from WH Smith to TG Jones makes a lot of sense. Modella Capital were swift to affirm that it is “business as usual”. All the stores will remain open, doing what they do now, with all the staff retained. Two initials and one of the most common surnames is replaced by two initials and one of the most common surnames.

Now the juxtaposition of Smith and Jones is very tempting in its offer to reference specific 1970s or 1980s TV shows. From a marketing perspective it is so cheesy, at least to anyone over 60. But to put that aside: what is in a name?

WH Smith is a 233-year-old company and remained in the hands of the family until 1972. It has a heritage that has real substance behind it. It is the genuine fruit of all that has gone before. TG Jones is a fiction. A necessary invention to fill the gap, to provide a new name in place of an original that has migrated elsewhere. As Charlotte Black, chief strategy officer at Saffron Brand Consultants observed:

“It feels incredibly close, a poor mirror of WH Smith and not necessarily very well thought through … I would say it feels hasty – an ‘insert here’ strategy – and a bit of a missed opportunity.”

Ultimately, it’s about identity. Superficially it appears that a genuine history is being supplanted by pure fabrication. Any “sense of family” in TG Jones is vacuous because TG Jones never existed. There is no back story.

WH Smith, on the other hand, does have a back story. Yet, having been a company run by shareholders since shortly after the second world war, how real is the “sense of family” there either? This is not the proverbial ‘mom and pop’ store. It is actually a corporate leviathan. There might be a sense of rootedness in the name, but a “sense of family” disappeared a long while ago.

Now, with the name gone, the High Street shops have even lost that sense of rootedness, however tentative it had become. Where does that leave their identity? I’m sure the branding consultants and marketing departments have been all over this. However, identity is not established just by saying that something is so.

Thinking about Smith becoming Jones then sent me down a rabbit hole of thoughts. So, bear with me here.

We all know about identity because we all have one.

At any given moment in time we are the product of a complex interplay of things. From our families and where we grew up, to the choices we’ve made and those that are foist upon us. The experiences we’ve had shape us. They make us into the people we are and help define our identity.

Yet nothing is set in stone. There is something intrinsic to life that is dynamic, ever-changing and open to all kinds of possibilities. It is dynamic and multi-dimensional and alive to endless possibilities.

In this sense, life is not deterministic, and our identity is not fixed. How we see ourselves and how others see us can change. As important as our personal history and heritage are in helping us understand ourselves, life is provisional, and our identity can change.

That change can be evolutionary or revolutionary, it can come from inside ourselves, or result from our responses to what comes at us from outside. Life is a constant process of becoming who we are. Our choices matter. They have consequences. Nothing stands still.

The possibility of turning life around, the opportunity of making fresh starts and hopeful visions for a better future have proven to be the bedrock of human resilience. The essential ingredients to ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again’, to quote the famous 1930s standard. They’re also foundational insights that underpinned what Jesus stood for and taught. Proven across the range of human life, activity and ingenuity

But back to TG Jones, I think I’m with Charlotte Black, the renaming is hasty, ill-thought through and a missed opportunity. Maybe the name will go the same way as Royal Mail’s abortive makeover as ‘Consignia’ in 2002. Identity is more than branding; we will know it by its fruit.

In the meantime, when the new regime has established itself, I may swing by to see what they’ve done with the old place.

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