05 June 2026

Episode #184: David Z. Morris on Effective Altruism and the Inner Workings of Sam Bankman-Fried

Brazil Crypto Report

About

Ola pessoal!

For this week’s episode of Bits and Borders, I’m joined by veteran financial journalist and former CoinDesk colleague David Z. Morris.

David is the author of Stealing the Future, a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it.

He covered the Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial for Protos and had a front-row seat to the collapse. His reporting at CoinDesk helped surface the leaked balance sheet that triggered the unraveling.

His book is the only comprehensive account of the case built on trial testimony, making it more authoritative than other SBF books that preceded it, such as the works by Michael Lewis and Brady Dale.

Notably, David goes beyond discussing what SBF did and didn’t do wrong and explores in-depth the effective altruism ideology that shaped Sam’s thinking and worldview.

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Here are the key points from our conversation:

* Effective altruism didn’t just influence SPF: it gave him an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds, because utilitarian ends-justify-the-means logic overrode rules like “don’t lie” and “don’t steal.”

* Michael Lewis’ book about SBF is not just wrong, Morris argues - it functionally operates as part of the cover-up, reflecting how thoroughly Lewis was captured by the social world around FTX.

* The “SBF truther” movement is partly organic (bag-holders in denial) and partly, Morris argues, a coordinated disinformation campaign run by SBF’s parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried.

* Morris addresses rumors of “Deep State” or intelligence community involvement in FTX as a speculative claim worthy of further examination. He notes that Sullivan Cromwell, the law firm that ran the FTX bankruptcy, has a long documented relationship with the CIA, and SBF himself accused them of feeding evidence to prosecutors during his trial.

* Effective altruism has rebranded since the FTX collapse - the same ideas now circulate under labels like “abundance” and “effective accelerationism,” pushed by many of the same people.

* Morris portray’s SBF’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison sympathetically: a devout Catholic who lost her faith and let effective altruism fill the void, only to be manipulated by SBF through both romantic and ideological leverage.

This was a super interesting conversation with David about a painful moment in our industry’s history and its consequences, along with the underlying worldview that led to this outcome.

I highly recommend reading David’s book if you want to better understand how these of effective altruism and “accelerationism” are influencing the current debate in tech.

You should also subscribe to David’s Dark Markets publication on Substack where he’s been putting out a lot of banger articles about many of the questionable characters in our industry.