Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis

ACT I

1

YUP

Most of the people who went to work for Sam Bankman-Fried ended
up in jobs for which they were not obviously qualified, and Natalie
Tien was no exception. She’d been raised in Taiwan by middle-class parents
whose only real hope for her was that she’d find a rich husband. She was
small and agreeable and ill-designed for rebellion. She still reflexively
covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. And yet she’d been
determined to prove to her parents that they’d underestimated her. After
college she’d gone hunting not for a husband but for work. She’d been so
anxious about her own ambition that, before each interview, she’d write out
and memorize exactly what she wanted to say about herself. She’d landed
the first real job she’d applied for, at an English-language training company,
and it had bored her to tears. But then, in 2018, at the age of twenty-eight,
she’d discovered crypto.
The previous year, the price of bitcoin had risen almost twentyfold, from
$1,000 to $19,000, and the daily trading volumes had boomed by some
massive amount that was hard to precisely quantify. (The closest thing to an
accurate accounting of what occurred was from the Coinbase crypto

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis