In the preface, Michael Lewis introduces the central figure of the book, Sam Bankman-Fried, as an enigmatic character. Lewis refers to Bankman-Fried by his first name throughout the text.

Lewis explains how a friend—someone who was looking to close a financial deal with Sam—asked Lewis to figure out who Sam was. Sam agreed to meet up with Lewis outside Lewis’s home in Berkeley, California.

By the time of their meeting, Sam, a man in his twenties, had already amassed a fortune of billions of dollars through his cryptocurrency trading platform, FTX. As Sam and Lewis walked and talked, Lewis learned that Sam thought he could use “infinity dollars” (xiii) to solve the world’s problems. Sam was concerned with big, existential threats—pandemics, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the decline of American democracy—and he wanted to use money to solve them.

Sam was toying with the idea of paying off the national debt of the Bahamas ($9 billion) because he hoped to build his crypto empire there. He had relocated FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he had built, from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, due to Chinese restrictions on cryptocurrency.