November 11, 2022, 10:21am
Look, it’s easy to dunk on nerd-bro crypto evangelists… So let’s!
In a September profile of brand new poor person Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, he makes it pretty clear that books are for beta losers who won’t ever know the rush of losing $16 billion in a single week. Here’s the salient exchange with writer Adam Fisher (which originally appeared at Sequoia Capital’s site, but has since been scrubbed):
“I’m addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer.”
“Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
I don’t know that I really have much to add here except that I’m not surprised. Though we probably didn’t need any more of them, this week has provided invaluable and numerous remedial lessons in the absolute idiocy of the planet’s billionaires.