By early 2022 Sam’s situation was totally out of hand. Every important person on the planet seemed to want to get to know him. He had said yes to them all. Anyone else in Sam’s situation would have built out a huge network of schedulers and advisers and gatekeepers. Sam had only Natalie, who was no longer just Sam’s public relations head and Sam’s private scheduler but, on occasion, Sam’s bodyguard. She was a circus juggler with a thousand balls in the air. No one ball was all that important, but Natalie sensed that any given ball, if dropped, might trigger a cascading crisis. And on the morning of Feb. 14, one of those balls had her especially worried.

Three days earlier, Sam had boarded a private plane in the Bahamas bound for Los Angeles, with nothing but his laptop and a change of underwear. Since then, he’d had brunch with Shaquille O’Neal and dinner with the Kardashians, and had watched the Super Bowl with the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. He’d chatted with Hillary Clinton and Orlando Bloom. He’d attended four parties and had met with entrepreneurs who wanted him to buy their businesses, and also with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was eager to get to know Sam better. For the previous three nights Natalie hadn’t been entirely sure where, or if, Sam had slept, but she knew he’d checked into the room she’d booked for him at the Beverly Hilton, because she’d watched him do it.

Now, on the 14th, the hotel room looked as if he’d never arrived. The sheets were still crisp, the pillows undented, the trash cans empty, the bathroom sparkling. The only sign of a human presence in the room was Sam himself. He sat at the desk in the same wrinkled T-shirt and baggy cargo shorts he’d worn on the plane ride in. As always, he was doing several things at once: checking his phone, applying ChapStick to his perpetually parched lips, opening and closing windows on his laptop — all while his knee jackhammered at four beats a second. His assigned task — the one Natalie had reminded him about the night before, and again this morning — was being on time for his Zoom meeting. He was already late. Yet another very important person who really wanted to meet him was waiting for him inside his laptop.

“Hey, this is Sam!” said Sam, to his laptop, as his Zoom box opened.

Onto his screen popped Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue magazine. She wore a tight yellow dress and careful makeup and a bob cut so sharply that its fringes plunged and curved down around her face like the blades of two scythes. “I’m so happy to finally meet you!” she said.

“Hey, it’s great to meet you too!” Sam replied.

Sam didn’t really know who Anna Wintour was. Natalie and others had briefed him, but he hadn’t paid attention. He knew Anna Wintour edited a magazine. He might or might not have been dimly aware that Meryl Streep had played a character inspired by her in “The Devil Wears Prada,” and that she’d ruled the treacherous world of women’s fashion since — well, since before Sam was born. She looked like a million bucks, but her art, like all art, was wasted on Sam. When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance — even a person he’d slept with — he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

As Anna Wintour began to speak, he clicked a button and she vanished from his screen. In her place popped his favorite video game, “Storybook Brawl.” He had only a few seconds to choose his character.

He picked the Hoard Dragon. The Hoard Dragon was maybe Sam’s favorite hero to play.

“Yup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour was saying. He could still hear her through headphones. Unless she watched his eyes, she had no reason to think that he wasn’t paying attention. Sam didn’t want to seem rude. It was just that he needed to be playing this other game at the same time as whatever game he had going in real life. His new social role as the world’s most interesting new child billionaire required him to do all kinds of dumb stuff. He needed something, other than what he was expected to be thinking about, to occupy his mind. And so, oddly, the more important he became in the eyes of the world, the more important these games became to him.

“Storybook Brawl” had everything Sam loved in a game. It pitted him against live opponents. It required him to make lots of decisions quickly. Games without clocks bored Sam. It energized him to have seconds ticking away as he assembled his platoon of fantasy characters — dwarves, witches, monsters, princesses and so on. Each character came with two numbers attached to it: how much damage it could inflict on other characters and how much damage it could itself survive. Each also had more complex traits — for example, the ability to cast random spells, or to interact in peculiar ways with specific treasures it collected along the way, or to strengthen comrades in some quantifiable way. The game was too complicated to know with certainty its optimal moves. It required skill, but also luck. It required him to estimate probabilities, but also to guess. This was important; Sam didn’t care for games, like chess, where the players controlled everything and the best move was in theory perfectly calculable. Chess he’d have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly! Or almost anything — so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they’d been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

“Yuuuuuup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour had just said. His dwarf platoon, to which he’d added a princess or two, was defending the Hoard Dragon. At the same time, it was attacking its new foe, his opponent’s hero, a fat white penguin named Wonder Waddle. A dwarf named Crafty assaulted a sad-looking wimp called the Lonely Prince. Sleeping Princess wiped out the Labyrinth Minotaur. A sleeping maiden awakened to cast a spell that caused a dying character to turn into three arbitrarily generated living ones. So much was happening all at once! It would have been impossible for him to follow the action, even if that were all he was following.

“Yuuuuuup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour had just said. His dwarf platoon, to which he’d added a princess or two, was defending the Hoard Dragon.

“Yuuuuuuuuup,” said Sam. The noises the woman was making were still entirely ceremonial. No real content here. But each of Sam’s yups was warmer, more animated, than the last. And she was clearly warming to him. Everyone did these days. When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything. Their desire freed you up from having to pay attention to them, which was good, because Sam had only so much attention to give. Another battle was about to begin. As the seconds ticked down, he hastily selected a new army of killer trees and dwarves. At the same time, he pulled up a document: the notes Natalie had created for this very meeting. Sam now looked them over for the first time. Anna Wintour was definitely the editor of Vogue magazine.

“That’s interesting,” he said, as the battle commenced. Again, it was over in seconds. Already the Hoard Dragon was in trouble. Its health number was declining faster than the competition’s. A lot of the heroes were front-loaded; the Hoard Dragon was one of the rare ones that acquired its special powers only later in its life. The way to play the Hoard Dragon was to buy treasures that paid off more for it than for any other hero — but the payoff came way down the road, like eight battles later. In the meantime, you were diverting resources from the battle at hand. Sam didn’t need to win these early battles. He just needed to keep the Hoard Dragon alive long enough to enjoy the future gargantuan payoffs from the treasures he was accumulating. Anna Wintour was making that difficult. She wanted so much attention! And she was arriving at the reason for the call: the Met Gala. Organized by Vogue magazine. But rather than simply explain it to him and leave him in peace, she asked Sam what he knew about it.

Sam shifted in his chair. From his wrinkled cargo shorts he pulled his ChapStick. He twiddled it. Valuable seconds ticked away. Finally, he hit a button. The Hoard Dragon vanished, and Anna Wintour reappeared. Curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her.

“I don’t know as much about your industry as obviously you do,” he said, cautiously. “I know some of the public information, but I don’t know much of the behind-the-scenes information.” Some information. Strictly speaking, that was true: Sam knew some information. He knew that the Met Gala was a party. Attended by celebrities. Beyond that, he didn’t know much. For example, he could not have told you if the “Met” was the Metropolitan Opera or the Metropolitan Museum or, for that matter, the Metropolitan Police.

Anna Wintour was clearly used to this situation. To Sam’s great relief, she now began to explain the thing. The moment she opened her mouth, Sam switched out her face for a page from Wikipedia:

“Interesting!” said Sam. “That’s super interesting.” But even as he expressed this interest, he pressed a button that caused the Wikipedia page to vanish. In its place appeared an enormous golden tomahawk. The Hoard Dragon was hanging by a thread. Another battle was about to begin, against a character named Peter Pants. Peter Pants was the opposite of the Hoard Dragon. Peter Pants was a make-or-break character whose powers dwindled over time. Peter Pants was all about killing you quickly. Peter Pants might finish off the Hoard Dragon in a single battle. Sam had only a few seconds to organize his fighting force. He needed to focus. Anna Wintour was making that impossible.

“Yuuuup,” said Sam.

Anna Wintour now said she wanted to hear more about what FTX had done, giving-money-away-wise. Compelled to speak, Sam allowed her face to return to his computer screen. “We’ve done sponsorship deals with some places,” he said. “But it’s somewhat of an accident what we jumped into first. We really try to look hard at what partnerships would be most impactful. That’s why we’ve partnered with Tom and Gisele.” Partnered. Again, strictly true. It didn’t capture the spirit of the relationship. Sam had agreed to pay Tom Brady $55 million, and his then-wife, Gisele Bündchen, another $19.8 million, for 20 hours of their time each, over the next three years. Sam was paying people more money per minute than anyone had ever paid them to do anything in their entire lives. He’d paid Larry David $10 million to create a 60-second ad — over and above the $25 million the ad cost to produce and air during the Super Bowl — which Sam had watched just the day before. It was a great ad.

The Hoard Dragon was dying.

Sam might not have been entirely sure what the Met Gala was, or exactly what role he might play in it, but he could sense what Anna Wintour was after. She didn’t want only his money; she wanted him. Present, on her Met Gala red carpet, beside her, creating buzz. Sam also understood what he might get in return for his sacrifice: women. Or, rather, access to the female crypto speculator. FTX had spent vast sums to capture the minds of men. Fashion, to Sam’s way of thinking, occupied roughly the same place in the female imagination that sports did in the male imagination. He’d asked some marketing people for a list of things he might do in fashion to appeal to women. The Met Gala was on the list. And so here he was, on a Zoom call with Anna Wintour herself, who now seemed to be hinting that Sam might pay for the entire shindig.

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Sam, but his mind was elsewhere. The Hoard Dragon was dead. Anna Wintour had killed it. What to do? He made a halfhearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero but then changed his mind and shut the game down. He could often occupy two worlds at once and win in both. In this case he clearly stood no chance of winning in one world unless he paid less attention in the other. And this woman somehow had acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities to multitask. For now she was asking him not only for his money and his time. She wanted to know all about his political activities.

“My mom is working full time on the effectiveness of political campaign donations, and my brother is in D.C. with policymakers,” Sam said, returning Anna Wintour’s face to his laptop. “We’re doing a decent amount to see just how hard we can make it to steal an election. It’s sad that’s the forum we have to fight in, but it is.”

For a surprisingly long time, Sam’s spending on American elections had flown under the radar. Back in 2020, he’d sent $5.2 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign without anyone asking or even thanking him for it. He was Biden’s second- or third-biggest donor, and yet the campaign had never even bothered to call him. Since then, Sam had tossed tens of millions more dollars at 100 different candidates and political action committees, in ways that made his identity difficult to detect. It was yet another game — How to Influence American Politics — that he was learning by doing, and it was pretty fun, especially when you had the special power of invisibility. But then he “fucked up,” as he put it. He let it slip in some interview that he was thinking of hurling a billion dollars into the next presidential election. That remark would awaken the beast. And now Anna Wintour was professing her love for Pete Buttigieg. She was asking where, exactly, Sam planned to be in the next few weeks. To talk more about Pete Buttigieg.

“I certainly would love an introduction,” said Sam. “He’s someone who I’d love to see as president.” If he thought that would satisfy Anna Wintour, he was wrong. She wanted to nail down a place in the real world where Sam might be, and a time he might be there.

“I’m in the Bahamas 60 percent of the time,” said Sam, neatly evading the question. “I’m in D.C. some. For better or worse, my job is now 30 percent telling the regulators about what regulation should look like for crypto in the United States.” His bare left leg now curled under his bottom on the hotel desk chair; his right heel, encased in a white athletic sock, bounced up and down off the hotel carpet. He looked less like a crypto tycoon than a first-grader who needed to pee. But now Anna Wintour was talking again, thank God. Liberated, he scrolled through his Twitter feed. Two nights earlier, Sam had been introduced to Katy Perry. Katy Perry had wanted to know all about crypto. Now she was posting on Instagram: “im quitting music and becoming an intern for @ftx_official ok 👋.”

Anna Wintour’s tone was changing. She had gotten what she came for and was now warmly ending the conversation. To be free of her, all Sam needed to do was make his usual sounds of total agreement with whatever she said.

Yup.

That makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, I would love to!

See ya!

With that, Sam hit a button and Anna Wintour was gone for good.

With the understandable impression that Sam Bankman-Fried, the most openhanded billionaire ever to have walked the Earth, had agreed to be her special guest at the Met Gala. That Sam might even pay for the entire thing. Sam, for his part, hadn’t really thought about it. He’d not even begun to do his Met Gala math. “I would have to think hard if this is a thing I want to go to,” he said, as he stowed his laptop in his backpack with his spare underwear and headed for the door of his Los Angeles hotel room, on his way back to the Bahamas.

“I would certainly be out of place there. It’s going to be a difficult needle to thread.”

In the ensuing weeks, Sam gave Anna Wintour’s people no reason to think he was doing anything but threading needles. FTX’s marketing people sounded out Louis Vuitton about creating a red-carpet-worthy version of Sam’s T-shirt-and-cargo-shorts look. Other FTX employees, perhaps hedging the company’s bets, paid Tom Ford to design a more conventional outfit, complete with $65,000 cuff links. Behind the scenes, wheels spun and gears ground but Sam himself never really engaged with the process, or even said what was on his mind. He viewed the entire list of fashion plays dreamed up by the FTX marketing people with suspicion. “I have no idea which of these things matters and which doesn’t,” he said. “It’s not clear that there is any way to know.”

His whole life, as far back as he could remember, he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives. “You start by making decisions on who you are going to be with based on how they look,” he said. “Then, because of that, you make bad choices about religion and food and everything else. Then you are just rolling the dice on who you are going to be.”

Very briefly, Sam set aside his disdain for the fashion industry and tried to do some math. Four billion women on the planet. Let’s say one in a thousand of them pays attention to the Met Gala. Let’s say one in a hundred of those gets interested in FTX … But it felt like trying to comb his hair when he had chewing gum stuck in it. His mind couldn’t even really get past the need for him to change out of his cargo shorts. And yet he allowed the decision to just sit there, festering, for months. The Met Gala would not occur until May 2. In Sam’s mind he had until roughly the night of May 1 before he had to tell Natalie what he planned to do.

Natalie was prepared for Anna Wintour’s people to be disappointed when she told them that Sam wouldn’t be there. It was their outrage that surprised her. “They called and shouted and said Sam will never set foot in fashion again!” said Natalie. So much for pulling more women into crypto. Natalie didn’t understand why the Met Gala was such a big deal. Sam’s last-minute decision not to go would not create anything like the havoc caused by some of his other internal calculations. CEOs had flown to the Bahamas under the mistaken impression that Sam had agreed to buy their companies. The World Economic Forum had to scramble to fill a stage and cancel media interviews after Sam decided, the night before he was meant to deliver a big speech in Davos, not to. Sam had failed to fly to Dubai to give the keynote at Time magazine’s party for the world’s 100 Most Influential People, even after Time had named him to their list and flattered him in print. “In a crypto landscape ridden with scams, hedonism, and greed, Bankman-Fried offers a kinder and more impactful vision brought forth by the nascent technology,” Time had written, the week before Sam stiffed them. Tyra Banks and will.i.am and all the rest of the world’s other most influential people were treated to hastily prepared remarks delivered by a not entirely sober FTX employee named Adam Jacobs, who was bewildered to be standing in for Sam. “I’m like, What is the head of payments doing giving this speech?” said Jacobs. “Why am I drinking with will.i.am?”

But the people at Time magazine hadn’t made a stink. No one except Anna Wintour’s people did: The general rule of life as late as May 2, 2022, was that Sam got to be Sam. It didn’t cross Natalie’s mind to feel even a tiny bit irritated with Sam. She could never be upset with him for the mess he left for her to clean up, because she knew that he never intended to make a mess. She could even forgive people who called to scream at her about Sam. If she herself didn’t fully understand Sam, how could anyone?

The post Opinion | Michael Lewis: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s last year in crypto – Washington Post appeared first on ICO Battle News.