Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried and the Tech Utopians

When does a philosophy become a conspiracy?

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the ＄11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider - but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. ＂Effective Altruism＂ and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart of OpenAI, the tech darling that took FTX’s place as the face of the future.

David Z. Morris is one of the most respected and longstanding journalists covering cryptocurrency. He was part of the team at CoinDesk that exposed and brought down Sam Bankman-Fried. As a staff writer at Fortune he coveredTesla and a variety of tech firms, and has written about technology for The Atlantic, Slate, and Aeon.