Description: When does a philosophy become a conspiracy?
In 2024, Sam Bankman-Fried -- once hailed as the future of finance and one of the richest men in America -- was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing $11 billion and collapsing over a hundred companies. Stealing the Future is the inside story of that unraveling, told by a member of the CoinDesk team that first broke the case. But this is more than a true crime story. It's a journey into the tangled web of tech-utopianism, libertarian idealism, and the seductive ideologies of Silicon Valley -- from Effective Altruism to transhumanism -- that helped cloak one of the biggest financial frauds of the 21st century. As these philosophies increasingly fuel the global far right, Stealing the Future asks: what happens when abstract theories gain real power -- and who's really paying the price?Review Quotes: "Stealing the Future nails Sam Bankman-Fried for what he truly is: an overly-confident, ineffective and amoral narcissist."
- Paul Dylan-Ennis, Assistant Professor, School of Business, University College Dublin
- Marc Hochstein, Vice President for Research, Galaxy Digital; Former Deputy Editor-in-Chief, CoinDesk "Stealing the Future explores the past to explain a present beset by futurists... It's a plea for us to resist that fraud, and indeed, the grander fraud at the core of our society today: that the elites know better than us."
- Josh Cincinnati, President of the Interchain Foundation and Former Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation, cypherpunk and privacy advocate "Among the most important books of the year."
- The American Prospect