On Feb. 12, an X account for Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto trading platform FTX, posted, "Under Biden, companies were forced offshore. Under @realDonaldTrump, they're welcome back in America. Insane regulation by Dems: require licenses, refuse to give them out. They literally couldn't operate in America. Under President Trump, that's changed. The DOJ is no longer indicting entire industries."

It was a personal message from Bankman-Fried, who is roughly two years into a 25-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy and wire fraud stemming from FTX's dramatic collapse. The post followed a series written by Bankman-Fried the month before, communicated over a prison phone to an intermediary, and then shared with the online world. In those earlier messages, Bankman-Fried had criticized former President Biden, while lavishing praise on the Trump administration. On Jan. 29, Bankman-Fried had posted an 11-tweet thread titled, "Why I became a Republican in 2022." Reports soon confirmed what practically everyone could already see: Bankman-Fried was lobbying President Trump for a pardon.

In "Stealing the Future," David Morris makes the case that Bankman-Fried's fraud was driven not primarily by greed, accident, or negligence, though each certainly played a part, but by an "ends justify the means" hubris instilled in Bankman-Fried by the effective altruist movement. Morris, a financial journalist who was among the first to cover FTX's collapse, uses the story of Bankman-Fried's fall from grace to critique the cultural and intellectual forces that shaped him. Few are left spared in Morris's account, from other FTX employees, to Stanford University, from effective altruism's intellectual leadership to the upper echelons of the technology capitalist class.

The book retells the notorious story of FTX's unraveling, which began in November 2022 when a company balance sheet that was circulated on social media revealed that the cryptocurrency exchange's financial stability relied heavily on holdings from an investment firm named Alameda Research. It soon became clear that Alameda was a shell company operating under Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried's meek, off-and-on lover and Alameda's CEO, whom Bankman-Fried had micromanaged on a daily basis into making specific investments. The problem, however, was worse than that: Bankman-Fried had transferred billions of dollars directly from FTX customers' accounts to pay for Alameda's investments.

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