Before Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for defrauding customers of his failed bank FTX Cryptocurrency ExchangeSpent some time with data expert and pollster Nate Silver.
As Bankman-Fried prepared for his trial and faced the prospect of spending decades behind bars, he wasn’t sure he would accept a plea deal, according to Silver’s new book. On the Edge: The Art of Risking It AllThis book covers the stakes, from Silver’s time as a professional poker player, to the collapse of FTX, and finally to musings on whether artificial intelligence will actually lead to the end of the world.
In his book, “The Troubled Company,” Silver conducted a series of previously unpublished interviews with its founder via Zoom, in the Bahamas where Bankman-Fried lived and FTX was headquartered, over dinner in Manhattan at the three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, and at his parents’ home in Stanford, California, as he prepared for his fateful trial. Silver describes Bankman-Fried’s risk tolerance and state of mind during those fateful days, finding him reckless and seemingly unaware of the gravity of his actions.
“The combination of him not being really good at assessing risk to be euphemistic — I mean terrible at assessing risk — and being willing to gamble everything was so destructive and having this weird cult of personality around him,” Silver said. luck.
Throughout the book, he shares numerous examples of Bankman-Fried’s unique blend of threat, delusion, and radical commitment to trying to gauge the odds of everything around him that ultimately led to his undoing.
“The ironic thing is that Sam is not actually a good probability calculator,” Silver said in an interview.
willing to risk it all
Bankman-Fried described his risk tolerance to Silver with the analogy that anyone who never misses a flight arrives at the airport too early. This mindset led him to overspend on some cryptocurrency bets at his trading firm, Alameda Research. When they didn’t pan out, he quickly covered them with FTX customer deposits, precipitating a multibillion-dollar fraud that landed him in prison. FTX collapsed In 2022, however, the remainder of the company agreed to pay $12.7 billion For victims who lost their money.
A Bankman-Fried representative declined to comment.
Bankman-Fried was unable to see any possibility of bitcoin’s value declining, according to Silver. “He literally said, ‘Hey, if you’re not willing to risk your life being ruined, you’re a coward, and you’re doing this wrong,’” Silver said, recalling an interview he gave before the events that led to his arrest.
In another interview in the Bahamas in December 2022, after Bankman-Fried had already resigned as CEO of FTX and handed the company over to bankruptcy Bankman-Fried told Silver he “cannot disclose that information right now.”
A surprised Silver quickly realized what Bankman-Fried had in mind: SBF was envisioning a reboot of FTX, where he would play a central role in its operations, according to On the edge.
“river” vs “village”
For Silver, Bankman-Fried was the ultimate risk-taker, someone who was always willing to gamble everything for any amount of marginal gain.
This made him the worst version of the “river” type of thinker, Silver’s term for analytically minded people who view the world mostly as a series of probabilities, weighing almost every decision through the lens of risk-reward and cost-benefit.
The bulk of the “river” is made up of a powerful group of elites, including hedge funds, venture capitalists, startup founders, and professional gamblers. The river’s members, called “riverists,” include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, and Elon Musk—analytical, highly competitive, abstract thinkers who tend to be dissidents, according to Silver.
In his book, Silver writes that the “village” competing for cultural and political power with Riverside residents is “the village,” made up of academics, media people, and government officials who “have distinctly left-of-center politics associated with the Democratic Party.”
The village sees the river as embodying a kind of unfettered capitalism, while the river believes the village has allowed everything to be “swallowed up by politics,” he says.
Silver, who openly admits to being a member of the River Tribe, points out that neither group is made up of ordinary people. “Both the River Tribe and the Village are very small,” he explains. “They are elite movements. They are elites who are fighting for influence—not money—mostly over American political culture.”
Sam Altman and the Dangers of Artificial Intelligence
For a risk-obsessed person like Silver, the question of AI is the ultimate cost-benefit analysis. If a Riverlander like Bankman-Fried can make such egregious mistakes at a cryptocurrency exchange, “think of an exchange with the technology that has the potential to change civilizations like AI,” Silver wrote.
Proponents say AI could lead to UtopiaWhere poverty is eliminated, humanity find the cure All the diseases, all the work is done by machines, leaving humans to spend their days enjoying themselves. But skeptics say that’s the reason. He could Leads to destruction Silver is not a pessimist, but he does not ignore their concerns.
“To dismiss these concerns is ignorant,” Silver said in a statement. On the edge“Ignorance of scientific consensus, ignorance of the norms of debate, and profound ignorance of the human desire, with no apparent exceptions so far in human history, to push technological development to the edge.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the benefits of artificial intelligence are too high to risk, according to On the edgePessimists, Silver said, are “people who want to be pessimistic because it makes them cool.”
Meanwhile, Altman is “unleashing an accelerator,” reportedly seeking $7 trillion in funding for a new venture to build AI chips, and preparing to launch OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5 model. almostHowever, knowing exactly what Altman might be willing to risk is made more difficult by River’s tendency to say strange things just to get a reaction.
“The $7 trillion claim is another kind of provocative statement,” Silver said. “In fact, Sam Altman is in the provocative camp.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The habit of eliciting reactions from others found a similar spirit in at least one other Riviera resident—Silver himself.
“I think his tweets are very funny,” Silver said of Altman. “They may not be like CEO tweets, but he’s just a commentator, which I appreciate as a commentator.”