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Oh, he is smart, and he has a knack for the kind of weird, cut-throat gambling games that Jane Street allegedly engaged in (and again boy, does that explain subsequent behaviour when he was the guy running the entire show).
But he's not the super-genius that some have made him out to be, and (so far in the book anyway) a lot of his behaviour is a combination of rudeness because he now is so rich, other people have to smile and put up with it, some spergy (to use an old online term) ways of doing things, and plain not caring a damn about anything other than whatever stimulus is engaging him at the moment.
Keep him working at a place like Jane Street but for God's sake don't make him a manager, he'd have done okay. He might have made some colossal bad trade and sent a few thousands of millions down the tubes, but overall he'd have been another smart, mathy, finance guy.
Letting him loose to play in his own sandbox was the worst thing ever, because he very much does not give a damn about other people (never mind all the doing good stuff, that's... complicated). He wanted to make a big impact on the world, for whatever reason (again, armchair psychology says that was the only way he could get the attention of his parents, but I'm not Herr Doktor Freud) and EA was the bubble he fell into so that is where he diverted his energies. Make an absolute shit-ton of money - and clearly he thought he was the guy who could never go wrong - and put it into EA projects, make a huge impact because nobody else is doing exactly this, and bingo, you are now both filthy rich and everybody is calling you a secular saint.
Lewis says Bankman-Fried doesn't care about money, and I think that's right so far as it goes; he doesn't care about money as money or what it can buy, he cares about money as "ha ha I win, I'm better than you".
There's one stunning example from the early days of Alameda Research where Bankman-Fried has developed his own automated trading system and wants to play with it, but the spoilsports working with him won't let him:
Exactly. That's the point where, if you were in any doubt, you realise that this guy is a lying cheat who doesn't listen to anyone else because he is convinced he really does know it all, will say anything to make you think he agrees with you, then goes behind your back and does what he wants anyway. And is massively, massively careless about it, because he hasn't got the attention span of a goldfish.
I'm only two-fifths of the way through the book so I am very interested to see if Lewis's opinion changes as events change, but man. That right there is 100% why the management team left, and even though Lewis tries very hard to paint them as villains - that they tried to ruin Bankman-Fried - I am left agreeing with them that he should have been shut down and never allowed trade ever again, and a lot of the bad things down the line would never have happened if they had won.
Smart in a dumb way. "Okay, I promise I won't run this untested model that could blow all our money unless two people are here to turn it off once it makes a loss" and then immediately turns it on and lets it run unsupervised? You wouldn't let that guy park your car in case he ran it into a wall, or drove it off to sell it online because he's a lying cheating deceiver, never mind give him millions of dollars for risky, unproven trades.
Except a lot of supposedly savvy people did exactly that, and that is the great unsolved mystery of this entire story.
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Thing is that you don't have to be exceptionally smart to exploit a formal model as formal models are much easier to exploit than informal ones. It is why teaching a computer to play chess better than a human is relatively straight forward while teaching a computer to figure out if it's looking at a picture of a bird is not.
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You didn't need super fancy models to make money in crypto arbitrage back then. I wasn't old enough to have capital at the time, but I remember noticing price differences on different exchanges.
That was his advantage: the big companies were moving slowly because they were wary, his idea was to deliberately run the risk because move fast, break things:
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