Spellcaster: The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried

Spellcaster: The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is a reported narrative series from Bloomberg and Wondery, the makers of The Shrink Next Door. Its subject is a young billionaire who wore T-shirts, shorts and sandals, played an online game in which he commanded an army of fairies and elves, and talked a great deal about doing good. The trailer notes that apart from Mark Zuckerberg, no one had ever become so rich so young. Then, on December 12th, 2022, everything changes. What Sam called a screw-up, the U.S. government called one of the largest frauds in history, and the series works in the space between those two accounts. The storytelling does not stay locked on Sam. Caroline Ellison is a major thread. As a Stanford math major unsure what math majors even do, she walks into the offices of Jane Street Capital in the summer of 2016, afraid, as she later told the FTX in-house podcast, that finance would mean intensity and yelling. By 27 she is co-CEO of Alameda, describing a job full of uncertain decisions that someone has to make, and writing live action role-play games in her spare time. The title 'The Smartest Person I Know' echoes a line in the narration, where a mutual friend calls Ellison the smartest person she knew. Sam's origins run through effective altruism. In college he went vegan, joined animal rights groups on campus and talked about utilitarianism often enough to annoy some fellow students. He has said he was seriously considering working for an animal rights charity. Will had another idea: make money, then give it away. That exchange is part of the episode titled 'Earn to Give'. The writing leans hard on place. A crypto conference in the Bahamas in April 2022 is framed around Tegan Klein, a 29-year-old crypto entrepreneur and influencer, checking into a gargantuan beachfront hotel with a Roman-style bridge, a nightly fountain show and a tank of lionfish behind the front desk. The narrator is in the story as well. On a long drive with Ellison, the narrator, a crypto reporter, tried to keep work out of the conversation and then overheard that she and Sam had split the month before. The trailer brings in other voices: the awe Sam inspired when he walked into a room, a claim that he could delete a person from his reality, a picture of everyone racing for the same exit of a burning building. Hannah Miller, who introduces herself as a Bloomberg reporter, is among them. One voice recalls asking someone what to put to Sam and getting a blunt reply: ask where my money is. The trailer, 'Introducing - Spellcaster: The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried', sets out the premise most directly and makes a sensible first stop.