What Do Sam Bankman-Fried’s Weird Ideas About Risk Have to Do With FTX’s Collapse? Almost Everything.

James Surowiecki
5 min readDec 31, 2022
Sam Bankman-Fried speaking at the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2022 (MIT Bitcoin Club, via Creative Commons)

2022 was, you might say, the year when grifters got their just deserts. The year began with the conviction of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and ended with the arrest on fraud charges of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and the revelation that newly-elected Republican House member George Santos had essentially…

James Surowiecki

Written by James Surowiecki

14K Followers

I’m the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve been a business columnist for Slate and The New Yorker and written for a wide range of other publications.