Seductive ... Leaves the reader wanting to know more ... At moments Lewis seems so willing to let Bankman-Fried off the hook, even after Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud and money-laundering, for which he is on trial this week ... [A] vivid portrayal ... Lewis seems so deeply enmeshed in Bankman-Fried’s corner ... A more nuanced breakdown about what went wrong...would have bolstered Lewis’s book, which ends up focusing mostly on Bankman-Fried’s story and personality, and lacks some of the finer-grained financial analysis of Lewis’s previous books.

Strange ... You soon get the sense that Lewis felt unusually flummoxed by his material. Among the reliable pleasures offered by a Michael Lewis book are his formidable storytelling skills, his comic timing, his winsome confidence. He makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for ... Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein ... Stubbornly credulous ... Bankman-Fried also seemed to be on an endless publicity tour, eager to sing to any journalist who was willing to listen. And Lewis listened. He offers the quirky portrait that is standard fare in his books ... Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride ... Lewis is an undeniably talented writer, but the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t play to his strengths.

Well-timed, if unsatisfyingly convoluted, account of Bankman-Fried and the crypto businesses he built and tanked ... Lewis would seem to have found an ideal subject in Bankman-Fried ... Too often, though, Going Infinite is labyrinthine and downright arcane. Lewis doesn’t do his usual stellar job of explanatory journalism when it comes to the intricacies of cryptocurrencies.

The representative Lewis subject...is a winning contrarian, someone with the brilliance and confidence to see something no one else could, and to wager on it. This might have seemed an apt description of Bankman-Fried when Lewis began following him, in the spring of 2022 ... The consensus, six months later, was that Bankman-Fried was less of an unkempt prophet than an oafish charlatan. Was Lewis prepared to pivot from an admiring account to a skeptical one? Was he interested in telling this kind of story, or even capable of it? ... The book is not, as it turns out, a hagiography. Bankman-Fried is not portrayed as a hero. But he isn’t portrayed as an antihero, either. The book’s tone is one of tender beguilement, with the occasional flash of remonstrance; Lewis isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but he is defiantly open to evidence of Bankman-Fried’s innocence ... Perhaps the most relevant contrarian subject in this magnificently ambiguous book is Lewis himself. Lewis likes to write about figures who survey the informational landscape, weigh the probabilities, and, under conditions of uncertainty, take expensive gambles—which is exactly what Lewis himself has done ... For what it’s worth, Going Infinite is a stupefyingly pleasurable book to read. It’s perfectly paced, extremely funny, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting.

A largely sympathetic account of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s life, career and brief time as the world’s youngest billionaire ... The sort of skillfully told story we’ve come to expect from Mr. Lewis ... Mr. Lewis thinks there’s an explanation other than perfidy.

Lewis has called his new book, Going Infinite, which was published on the first day of the trial, a 'letter to the jury.' The message of that letter seems to be that Bankman-Fried is a fascinating, mercurial, and misunderstood genius ... One might have hoped that FTX’s self-destruction—and the media’s well-established role in burnishing Bankman-Fried’s image—would have provoked some reassessment from Lewis, if not outright revisionism. Unfortunately, Going Infinite is a colossal misfire, a remarkable act of authorial misapprehension that completely exonerates its protagonist without giving a moment’s thought to his many victims ... This is a book soaked in paternalism.

A portrait of grandiose ambition, youthful arrogance, and the distorting power of money ... In understated, streamlined prose, Lewis captures SBF’s weirdness ... The promise and the peril of a Michael Lewis book is that he gets close to his subjects—in this case, uncomfortably close. That isn’t such a problem in the early half of the book, where its protagonist is still a wild-haired wunderkind. But later, it begins to read like the case for the defense.

The fascinating story in Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s long-awaited book on the accused crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, isn’t that of SBF. It is the story of how Lewis, the best long-form journalistic writer of the past 20 years, fell for his protagonist and may have maimed his long-justified reputation in the process ... You might instead read Going Infinite in infinite expectation, as I did, that Lewis will turn the screw on Bankman-Fried. You will wait in vain. The action, such as it is, does not start until page 193 of a 254-page book ... On the whole, Lewis lacks the sort of scenes that made his previous books memorable ... Lewis, a vivid storyteller, paints a fascinating picture of Bankman-Fried, but he seems only to have seen one side of him: the side that dazzled the world.

Throughout the book runs this bizarre sleight of hand: a constant invocation of SBF’s genius, his Little-Man-Tate capacity for calculation, his utter boredom in school, in jobs, in life, in relationships, at a world that simply moves at a slower pace … with virtually no evidence that this guy was particularly smart or good at math ... Had Lewis been taken in by the con man? Was this Boswell too close to his Johnson? ... He was the worst possible thing for a biographer of real but limited talent: He was boring ... Lewis is back in his element in the gripping but too-brief concluding section.

Lewis spent eight months observing Bankman-Fried’s wildly chaotic empire at first hand ... Lewis has lots of subtle fun with the effective altruists, working 24/7 to give fortunes away according to utilitarian principle ... As Bankman-Fried perhaps envisaged, Lewis’s presence guarantees at least one unlikely certainty: this all actually happened.

Fascinating ... I should say here that I love Michael Lewis. As with all of his writing – with the exception of a toe-curling profile he did of President Obama for Vanity Fair 11 years ago – Going Infinite is insanely readable and I devoured it, marvelling at Lewis’s ability to pace, structure and humanise a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto.

Doesn’t really work ... For a book whose story is in large part about Bankman-Fried applying the flash-trading techniques he learned during a brief career on Wall Street to the lawless frontier of crypto trading, the acknowledgment that all of this is not just meaningless but valueless lets the air out of the story a bit ... The insistence that Bankman-Fried is just like this, and that his mistakes, whatever they might be, were just Sam being Sam, is not convincing in the book.