Niall Ferguson, Columnist

FTX Kept Your Crypto in a Crypt Not a Vault

The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is a tale of the way we live now — tweeting, not reading.

November 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM UTC

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

No longer a bazillionaire.
Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg

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Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t read books. As he explained in a profile on Sequoia Capital’s website (which will be an assigned text in journalism courses for the rest of time), “I would never read a book.” “I’m very skeptical of books,” he said. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

This error is not irremediable, because Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, is likely soon to have a lot of time for reading.