Sam Bankman-Fried | Theoretical Altruism | 1

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It's the evening of December 12th, 2022, in the bathroom of a penthouse apartment in the Bahamas.

An extractor fan hums.

The cold light of a laptop screen spills across the tiled floor.

30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried sits cross-legged, staring at a spot on the wall.

Behind his dark, unmoving eyes, his mind spins.

The bathroom is the only place Sam can get some peace and quiet.

For the last month, he's been surrounded by people either offering him advice or asking the name questions.

Questions like what happened and where's the money?

To Sam, though, there's simple queries from simple minds.

And no matter how many times he's tried to explain himself, Sam just can't seem to make people understand.

But his big chance to turn things around is coming up.

He's due to testify before the House Financial Services Committee in Washington tomorrow.

That's why he's in the bathroom of his luxury home to write a statement.

He hopes that he'll finally be able to clear the air to make people see what he was trying to do, make them understand that he can make things right.

But the clock is ticking.

About an hour ago, Sam's lawyer called.

The Bahamian authorities are on their way over.

They're going to arrest him.

So Sam needs to get everything down.

He takes up his laptop and begins to write.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

It's his mom.

Sam answers and puts the call on speaker.

Barbara Fried's voice echoes off the bathroom's cold tiles.

She's a lawyer and is full of advice about what Sam should and shouldn't say before members of Congress.

Not that Sam is paying much attention.

His mother's voice is just white noise to him now.

A soundtrack to the video game Sam's life has become.

His enemies have all the resources.

Sam's lost his weapons and his health bar is perilously low.

But he's not going to quit.

He keeps typing.

Even when he hears the police arrive at his front door.

Even when he hears them calling out for him.

Even when they burst into the bathroom and order him to place his hands behind his back.

Calmly, Sam stands and allows the police to arrest him.

On the phone, Barbara switches from law professor to concerned mother.

Telling Sam what he should and shouldn't be wearing when he goes to prison.

She keeps talking, her voice strained while the cops place handcuffs around her son's wrists.

As he's led out of the bathroom and through his expansive apartment, Sam notices a couple of his remaining employees rushing around.

Cramming clothes into a duffel bag.

They seem distressed, like his mother.

They're wondering aloud about how many pairs of socks Sam might need in jail.

Eventually, they finish shoving things into the bag and hand it to one of the officers while they're waiting for the elevator.

Sam says thank you, because that's what he's supposed to do.

None of it touches Sam.

Not really.

He's never understood emotions, not the way other people seem to.

And right now, he's grateful for that.

Just look at how this whole episode has affected everyone around him.

Emotions aren't helping anyone.

They certainly won't help Sam out of his current predicament.

They'd only slow him down.

Right now, his mind is like a lab rat in a maze, searching frantically for a way out.

There has to be one.

There has to.

But the truth, what Sam can't see, is that there is no way out.

And while it's true that emotions won't help him right now, that's only because nothing can.

Not his mother, not his employees, and not the brain that got him here in the first place.

It's finally time for Sam Bankman-Fried to face the consequences of his actions.

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From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In 1929, the world's economy collapsed.

A stock market bubble burst, causing widespread poverty that left an indelible scar on the American consciousness.

But the Wall Street Crash wasn't the last financial crisis to send the global economy into a tailspin.

Almost 80 years later, in 2008, the world was again gripped by a deep recession.

Banks had to be bailed out by governments with billions of dollars to prevent them collapsing.

These rescues were mostly successful, but they weren't universally popular.

And they were part of the reason that some people decided they wanted to abandon the traditional banking system that led the world into this disaster.

They wanted something new.

Then, at the beginning of 2009, a new kind of asset emerged on the global market, Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was decentralized, unregulated, and wasn't tied to traditional assets like dollars or stocks.

Unlike state-issued currencies, which were typically carried around in pockets or kept safe in banks, this new currency was stored on the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts.

It didn't take off as a popular form of payment for the masses, but Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies it inspired created a host of new investment opportunities.

There was no government oversight or federal reserve to step in and course correct if anything were to go wrong.

But to true believers, that was part of the appeal.

Cryptocurrency boosters didn't want government interference.

They felt better on their own.

In their minds, being untethered from traditional markets was the whole magic of Bitcoin.

The people who couldn't see that were going to miss out.

And for a while, it seemed like the crypto investors had it right.

In the late 20-teens, all kinds of cryptocurrencies were increasing in value.

That's when a young man with a brain for puzzles and an almost religious desire to make as much money as humanly possible took an interest.

Sam Bankman-Fried had experience working in finance and a mind in perpetual motion.

And after some early success running his own hedge fund, he built his own crypto exchange, FTX.

From there, he rode the crypto wave all the way up, drawing the world's attention to his altruistic cause and enriching plenty of investors along the way.

It seemed like there was no way any of them could lose, so people poured more and more money into this exciting, unregulated market.

But that was a mistake.

The bubble had to burst eventually, and no one was prepared for what Sam Bankman-Fried would do when it did.

This is episode one in a three-part series about Sam Bankman-Fried, Theoretical Altruism.

It's a Sunday evening in 1999 in Stanford, California, 23 years before the collapse of FTX.

The dining room of the home of Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried is noisy and full.

It's like this almost every week.

Joseph and Barbara regularly invite friends and colleagues over for dinner, and they all sit and eat and talk and drink.

The Bankman-Frieds are academics who live on campus, so their guests are usually intellectual types, professors, lawyers, lecturers, that sort of thing.

For Joseph and Barbara's eldest son Sam, the dinners seem to be a bore.

To be fair, most seven-year-olds would feel the same.

But then again, Sam's not like most kids his age.

While he picks at his food and the grown-ups discuss theology and conflicting moral imperatives, Sam might seem uninterested, but he's listening.

And while he doesn't say anything, he's taking it all in.

He considers each person, weighing the validity of their arguments, making judgment calls about who's right, who's wrong, and who's completely missed the mark.

Sam's mind is always ticking away, taking him several steps ahead of the people around him.

That's how he's always been.

It's how he always will be.

His mother notices early on that Sam's different from his peers.

He just doesn't seem to enjoy the things children his age usually do.

Places like amusement parks bore him, and he's not all that interested in playing with other kids.

As he gets older, he gravitates towards one or two classmates who he hangs out with occasionally, but that's about the extent of his friendship circle.

Other kids make him uncomfortable, as does the idea of being a kid.

They believe in things like Santa Claus, which Sam thinks is ridiculous.

Then again, adults believe in things like God, which Sam thinks is just as bad.

Not that that's the only thing about people that Sam doesn't understand.

The entire concept of facial expressions baffles him.

He just can't see the point in them.

What he does understand is that it makes others uncomfortable when he doesn't use them.

So he spends hours in front of a mirror teaching his face to move into approximations of joy, anger, surprise, a small toolkit of emotions he can project for the world around him, even when he doesn't really feel them himself.

Sam reads a lot, but even his interest in novels fizzles out by his teenage years.

From there, he moves on to reading Internet message boards, which is where he develops a strong passion for utilitarianism.

Essentially, that's an ethical theory where right and wrong are determined by actions that create the most happiness for the most people.

Cultural or structural norms aren't as important as making positive contributions to the planet.

Sam eventually becomes so committed to utilitarianism that when a friend points out that eating meat causes animals to suffer, Sam turns vegetarian.

In high school, he plays a lot of video games and gets into the card game Magic the Gathering.

He even makes it to the national championships for junior players.

But it's not until he goes to math camp the summer after his freshman year that Sam really feels a sense of belonging.

He's always been really smart, everyone could see it.

But here at camp, he's surrounded by people just like him.

It's at math camp that Sam develops a passion for puzzles.

Not the jigsaw kind, but the sort of puzzles that test the limits of a person's mental abilities.

After his first year at camp, he returns home to the Stanford campus and starts dreaming up elaborate scavenger hunts for other puzzle fanatics to solve.

The smart ones, the puzzlers and gamers and mathematicians, are Sam's people.

And as he nears adulthood, he chooses a path that's going to keep him in their orbit.

After graduating high school, Sam heads to MIT to study physics and mathematics.

But even physics can't hold Sam's attention for long, and he loses all interest in the subject by his junior year.

Still, he makes the most of his time at college, joining a co-ed fraternity that seems custom-built for him.

Epsilon Theta is full of other smart kids like Sam.

They all sleep in the attic of the frat house, which leaves the bedrooms free for studying.

But despite their shared commitment to schoolwork, what really unites the fraternity is a love of gaming.

At any given time, Sam and other members can be found playing complex strategy and role-playing games that last days or weeks at a time.

Sam loves the thrill of strategizing exactly how he can win.

He'll invest the time and patience convincing other players to form alliances with him, only to stab them in the back at the first chance.

It's fun for him, finding weaknesses and exploiting them to his advantage.

That might seem like an unappealing trait to have, but for some employers out there, it's exactly the skill set they're looking for.

In Sam's junior year, he attends the MIT job fair.

Some of the largest and most famous firms in industry, accounting and finance are there, hoping to attract the brightest minds of tomorrow.

Among them is Jane Street Capital, a prestigious but low-profile Wall Street firm.

Sam leaves his resume with them and is invited along to a day of rigorous interviews.

Or at least, they seem rigorous to most.

The tests focus on gambling and game theory and could have been written with Sam in mind.

It's no surprise that he impresses his interviewers, and they offer him an internship for the upcoming summer.

Places like Jane Street are highly selective, and their interns are said to earn tens of thousands of dollars for around three months' work.

For Jane Street, those paychecks are investments.

That's on the potential of the chosen students.

The ones who prove themselves are offered full-time positions, and Sam's only there for a few weeks before he gets that tap on the shoulder.

So once he graduates from MIT in 2014, Sam returns to Jane Street's offices in New York to begin his career.

His starting salary is $300,000.

That'll double in his second year.

And that's not even counting his bonuses.

Once he gets to his third year, that bonus alone will be something like a million dollars.

And if he sticks around for the next decade or so, he can confidently expect to make tens of millions every year.

This is the path Sam is on.

And he's only just out of college.

It's enough to make a person's head spin.

Not Sam, though.

He's focused on the challenge of his job.

He's been placed on the firm's most profitable desk, which means he's dealing in exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.

It's a job that requires a lot of mathematical skill and a willingness to take risks.

But it's essentially a game Sam's playing with other people's money.

So when his trades come into the loss, it's not the end of the world.

Jane Street encourages big bets.

That's how the firm makes its money.

Losses are regrettable, but they're the price of doing business.

And if you win big enough to cover the losers, then there's no real harm done.

It's work Sam's good at, but despite that, he's not happy.

Even when he's surrounded by people who are as smart as he is, earning more money in a year than some people make in a decade, Sam isn't satisfied.

It's not enough.

A big part of that is just who he is, how he's always been.

But there's something else at play that contributes to Sam's sense of dissatisfaction, and that's a guiding philosophy he's been following for a couple of years now.

Back at the beginning of his junior year at MIT, Sam got an email from a guy called Will McCaskill.

Will was a Scottish philosopher and University of Cambridge graduate a few years older than Sam.

He invited Sam to meet for coffee in a chat.

When Sam arrived, Will launched into his pitch, explaining all about a movement he'd co-founded called Effective Altruism.

Based on ideas first popularized in the 1970s, Effective Altruism, or EA, aims to use evidence and reason to calculate how to generate the most benefit for others.

In Sam's case, Will had a very specific suggestion, and it's one he was making to plenty of other MIT students.

Earn as much money as you possibly can.

That's how you help the world.

Will's pitch essentially boiled down to this.

Any cerebral nerd with a bleeding heart can study to become a doctor or research ways to cure cancer.

But the way to truly make an impact is with money.

Effective altruists don't get their hands dirty with low level work.

They aim for the highest paying jobs they can possibly find, then funnel their paychecks into causes that will have the most impact.

Given his long fascination with utilitarian philosophy, the idea appealed to Sam.

He could see the merits of the argument, just like when his friend told him he should be a vegetarian.

Now, several years later, Sam's investing a hefty amount of his Jane Street salary directly into EA causes.

But he's started to wonder if it's enough.

Sure, if he stays on this path, he'll eventually be earning at least $15 million a year.

But Sam reckons he can do better than that.

It's the summer of 2017 when he starts thinking it's time to leave his coveted position at Jane Street.

He hasn't even been at the firm three years, but Sam is willing to risk it all and bet on himself.

Exactly what his next move is, he doesn't know yet.

But he figures he's got plenty of options.

Politics, journalism, the tech sector, all have the potential to have a big impact.

He just has to choose the best one for him.

And if Sam gets it right, he's sure he can change the world.

It's the summer of 2017, in the Bay Area of Northern California.

Sam Bankman-Fried is sitting on his couch, staring at his computer screen, trying to understand what he's seeing.

The web page he's looking at displays the prices of various cryptocurrencies in different world markets.

And there's a huge, exploitable opportunity that Sam can't work out.

For some reason, the price of Bitcoin, the first and best known cryptocurrency, is higher in Japan than it is in most other countries.

If the listing is accurate, that means that someone could buy Bitcoin in, say, the United States, then sell it on the Japanese market for a profit.

The differential is even larger in South Korea, where the price of Bitcoin is around 30% higher.

That's down to various factors, including certain regulations on cryptocurrencies within the country, as well as anti-money laundering laws.

They call it the Kim Chi premium.

These are the kind of inefficiencies that Sam spent most of his time at Jane Street Trading looking for.

But that was in a world of securities, stocks and futures.

This is the world of crypto, which Sam knows nothing about.

Then again, neither does his friend Tara McAuley.

She's made tens of thousands from crypto trades.

It might not sound like a lot of money, given the volume of the trades Sam makes at Jane Street each day.

But it's proof of concept.

Tara is a mathematician who runs the Center for Effective Altruism in Berkeley, which is where Sam has donated a lot of his earnings since graduating from MIT.

Tara started her crypto trades with a tiny investment.

Now, as he looks at the websites Tara sent him, Sam begins to think that if her approach could be repeated on a larger scale, then there's potential to make real money here.

Closing his laptop, Sam grabs a sheet of paper and a pen and starts doing some quick sums.

He calculates just how much money he could make by exploiting the inefficiencies between crypto markets.

And the numbers start to add up pretty quickly.

Not only is crypto a market that only seems to increase in value, the exchanges never close.

So in theory, a person can make trades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, exploiting loopholes like the kimchi premium over and over again.

Sam knows that he's guaranteed to make millions of dollars if he stays in his job at Jane Street.

But he could make even more than that in the crypto market.

It's not a sure thing, but if there's one thing he's learned at Jane Street, it's that taking risks is how you make money.

And if the right risks pay off, Sam thinks he might just be able to make a billion dollars.

That's the kind of money that could make real, positive change in the world.

So, Sam quits his job at Jane Street and moves back to the Bay Area.

It's time to get to work.

But he won't be on his own.

In the fall of 2017, Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara McAuley found a crypto trading firm they call Alameda Research.

It's a deliberately opaque name.

As an unregulated asset, cryptocurrencies make plenty of people wary of delving in.

But a name like Alameda Research is vague and boring enough to not attract any negative attention.

So, with their name chosen, Sam and Tara find an apartment in Berkeley, California for their base of operations.

For startup capital, Sam pours in the money from his final Jane Street bonus.

But that $500,000 isn't going to last very long.

Because they've already got several employees on the books.

Alameda's early core is made up of around 20 effective altruists.

Most have no experience in trading.

And few of them knew or cared much about crypto before they signed up.

But they're eager to put their intelligence and education to good use.

The new employees are assigned positions that best suit their skill set.

And most of them fall into two categories.

Traders and programmers.

The traders are responsible for finding crypto trades that will turn a profit.

While the programmers have to create code that works fast enough to capitalize on those trades.

Arbitrage trading is the industry term for what Sam has in mind.

Finding markets where cryptocurrencies are worth more than they are in another.

And exploiting that difference in price.

In theory, an arbitrage trader can keep making the same trades, moving money back and forth and banking a profit until the inefficiency disappears.

Usually in the finance world, the margins on arbitrage trading are tiny, fractions of percentages.

But Sam already knows that Bitcoin is commanding 10% more in Japan than in the US.

It's effectively free money, if you can make it work.

Those market inefficiencies usually exist for a reason, because there's some kind of pain point that's stopping everyone from exploiting them.

In this case, the problem is moving funds back and forth from the US to Japan.

First, Sam will need to open up various accounts with banks and crypto exchanges in each country.

Then, he'll need to buy the Bitcoin in the US, sell the coins at a higher price in Japan, and move the proceeds from those sales into a Japanese bank account.

Finally, the money in Japan will have to be wired back to the US, so the whole process can start all over again the next day.

But Sam can't do all that himself from the Alameda office in Berkeley.

Most Japanese banks insist on their customers actually being in Japan.

So Sam finds and recruits Japanese residents who are willing to stand in line at local banks and wire Alameda's money back to the US.

And although this raises some eyebrows at the Japanese banks, it mostly works out.

So for a while, Sam and his team have what amounts to a license to print money.

They're making 10% profits on their Bitcoin trades every single day.

But like all arbitrage opportunities, it eventually closes, and the profitable trades dry up.

But by that stage, things are looking good for the plucky startup.

They're taking big swings, trading in various cryptocurrencies around the world, and it seems to be paying off.

By December of 2017, just a month after the firm's launch, Alameda has attracted the interest of a few cashed up admirers, who sink $25 million into the firm.

Sam and his team take the borrowed cash and start turning profits of around $250,000 every day.

And that's just the beginning.

In January of 2018, profits doubled to $500,000 a day.

That's when the real money pours in.

One investor sends Alameda $130 million, which means they can turn even bigger profits from their trades.

Unfortunately, that's the last of the good news for a while.

In February, Alameda starts losing money, big money.

Suddenly, they're not making $500,000 a day, they're losing it.

And to make matters worse, several million dollars of a crypto asset called Ripple disappear in the middle of a transaction.

This wasn't a bad trade, the crypto just vanished into the ether somewhere.

No one can work out where the Ripple's gone or how it disappeared, which is the real problem, because if it happened once, it can happen again.

No one at Alameda wants to say it, but they're all thinking the same thing.

Maybe this was an inside job.

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, so they're incredibly difficult to trace.

It's perfectly feasible that one of Alameda's employees simply moved the Ripple into their own account with just a few keystrokes.

Sam seems completely unbothered by the loss, however.

His philosophy is that either the money will turn up eventually or it won't, and worrying about it won't change anything.

Besides, he intends to make more than enough money to cover the loss.

It's the philosophy he learned at Jane Street.

Losses are just part of the game.

That kind of thinking doesn't work for the rest of Sam's team, though, because if their investors find out Alameda has misplaced millions of dollars, then they might call in their loans, and then everything will come crashing down.

Most of the managers want to take a break from trading while they search for the money.

The risk of something similar happening again is too great, not to mention the possibility that they might be accused of fraud with such a huge unexplained loss.

But Sam's the one in charge, and he refuses to lose even one single day of trading.

No one's willing to budge, and things are getting more and more tense at Alameda every day.

That's the environment Caroline Ellison walks into in March of 2018.

A couple of years younger than Sam, Caroline was mentored by him when she started working at Jane Street Capital, and they've kept in touch ever since.

Around the time Sam was getting Alameda off the ground, Caroline met him for coffee in San Francisco.

When he told her about the startup, she'd been excited about the idea.

Like Sam, she'd only been out of college for a couple of years, and, like Sam, she'd been sucked into the world of effective altruism.

So Alameda research sounded like a dream job, and when Sam offered to bring her into the fold, it was an opportunity she couldn't pass up.

Only now, after Caroline has quit her lucrative job at Jane Street and moved across the country, Alameda looks more like a nightmare.

There's a cold war going on at the top of the company, and no one seems to have anything good to say about Sam.

He's supposed to be in charge, but he doesn't have any kind of leadership skills.

He frequently misses meetings, seems to go weeks without showering and sleeps at his desk.

Now, one could argue that all these things are symptoms of his commitment to the effect of altruism cause, and maybe they are.

But Sam seems convinced that everyone who works for him should follow in his footsteps.

He wants his employees to abandon their regular lives so they can work 18 hours a day like he does.

The rest of the team, however, they don't share Sam's approach to the work-life balance.

In short, morale is low at Alameda Research.

This is a group of people in their 20s who mostly don't know what they're doing.

Millions of dollars have vanished into the ether, and the management team are at each other's throats.

Looking around at a company teetering close to the edge, Caroline Ellison is wondering what on earth she's just wandered into, and what could possibly go wrong next.

It's early April of 2018, and 26-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried is in a closed-door meeting with the leadership of his crypto investment firm, Alameda Research.

Although the startup is dealing with tens of millions of dollars every day, they're still operating out of an apartment in California's Bay Area.

That's why they're in a sunny, slightly cramped bedroom instead of a gleaming boardroom.

But despite the casual setting, there's tension in the air.

Sam's managers are frustrated.

He's antagonized even old allies like Tara McAuley, who founded Alameda with him.

Now, they lay out their issues right to Sam's face.

His management style is erratic at best, and he seems to have no idea how to actually run a company.

While Alameda has made big profits in the past, they've also experienced big losses, including the misplaced Ripple token, which Sam still seems remarkably relaxed about.

And that's not the only instance where Alameda's staff don't share their boss's appetite for risk.

Sam has recently created a program called ModelBot that scours crypto exchanges for exploitable inefficiencies and then executes thousands of trades in a second to make easy profits.

At least that's the theory.

Sam wanted to have ModelBot running 24 hours a day, but plenty of people at Alameda worried that it could lose huge amounts of money and no one would be watching it to pull the plug.

After some debate, they struck an agreement.

Sam could turn ModelBot on only if he and at least one other person were around to keep an eye on it.

But just hours after agreeing to this, Sam went back on his word.

When everyone else had gone home for the night, Sam turned ModelBot on.

Then he promptly fell asleep.

It's been a few days since then, so that particular issue is still simmering.

Almost no one at Alameda trusts Sam Bankman-Fried anymore.

Unfortunately for the managers, they can't just summarily eject him.

Sam structured Alameda so that there's no board of directors, and he's the only one with any equity in the company.

That means that convincing him to leave willingly is the only way to get rid of him.

So the managers offer to buy Sam out and remove him from the company.

But Sam's not interested in their deal.

He believes in what he's doing with Alameda and isn't worried by losing a few million dollars every now and then.

He's focused on the long game.

Unfortunately for Sam, that might be difficult.

Thanks to Tara McAlley and the rest of the managers allied against him.

There are a lot of effective altruists in the Bay Area and Sam's colleagues are spreading the word that he's not to be trusted.

Some people are even hearing that Sam's faked his commitment to the cause as a way to make money.

And because most of Alameda's investors are part of the effective altruism community, these rumors aren't good for business.

Eventually, things boil over.

On April 9, 2018, Alameda's management team walks out, along with about half the firm's other employees.

Sam has to pay around $2 million in severance to the dozen or so leavers.

Then, some of Alameda's investors call to ask for a lot of their money back.

Whether they'd heard the rumors about Sam's intentions, or whether they just aren't as confident in the firm after it lost most of its employees, they clearly don't have faith in Sam Bankman-Fried anymore.

Once Alameda has compensated its ex-employees and repaid its investors, Sam's left with around $40 million to play with.

It's still a lot of money, but it's a step backwards in Sam's mind.

He wants to get a billion dollars, and that goal just got pushed further away.

But it's not all bad news.

Now that his naysayers are gone and the scuffle for control of the company is over, Sam's free to turn on ModelBot and let it do its thing.

And it turns out the program is a success.

It starts making money right away.

Then Alameda has another well-timed windfall.

The missing millions in Ripple Token show up.

It's been sitting in a South Korean crypto exchange for months and the exchange has only just figured out who to call.

It's a promising start for this new iteration of Alameda.

But one member of the company's suddenly smaller team has more than money on her mind.

Caroline Ellison has only been with the startup for a few months, but she's already nursing a crush on Sam.

It might have fizzled out had they not slept together.

Before they tumbled into bed, Sam told Caroline that he had conflicted feelings about sleeping with his employee.

But then did it anyway.

She's desperate to talk to him, but Sam's ignoring Caroline now.

She even proposes a formal meeting so they can discuss the matter like professionals.

But Sam's never been one for meetings.

It's about to become even harder for Caroline to get a hold of him.

Towards the end of 2018, Sam announces to the company that he's going to Hong Kong.

The crypto industry is booming there, and he figures it'll look good if he shows his face.

Maybe it could drum up more interest in Alameda.

This leaves Caroline feeling more cut off from Sam than ever.

With no one to talk to about the situation, she lays everything out for herself in a four-page memo, the kind of thing you might send around for feedback on a business proposal.

But this proposal is about pursuing a relationship with Sam, and it's full of helpful bullet points that illustrate the pros and cons of moving forward with the merger.

When she's done, Caroline decides that if anything's going to get Sam's attention, it's this, an easy-to-read document devoid of emotion and no longer than the average blog post, which is Sam's favorite medium.

So she sends him the memo, turning it into a kind of love letter, and waits for his response.

Sam is still in Hong Kong when Caroline hears back from him, but he's not responding to her romantic pitch.

Or maybe he is.

There's every chance that Sam's made this decision based on Caroline's pursuit of him.

But soon after getting the memo, he calls the team at Alameda and makes an unexpected announcement.

He's not returning to the States.

Instead, he's going to stay in Hong Kong.

Crypto is getting bigger and even faster than Sam imagined, and he wants to be right where the action is.

What Sam doesn't tell his staff is that he's now set his sights on something far greater than Alameda Research.

It's not something he can legally pull off in the US, but the rules are different in Hong Kong.

If he can make it work, the money he's been pulling in in Alameda will soon look like pocket change.

And the more money they make, the more money they can give to effective altruism causes.

Sam's determined to reach his billion dollars.

And if that causes a financial collapse, the likes of which the world hasn't seen in decades, so be it.

From Airship, this is episode one in our series on Sam Bankman-Fried.

On the next episode, Sam creates a new kind of crypto exchange and starts raking in the billions he's been dreaming of.

We used many different sources while preparing this episode.

A couple we can recommend are Going Infinite by Michael Lewis and Number Go Up by Zeke Fox.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shahzeeb.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Special thanks to Richard Metcalf.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsay Graham for Airship.