It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like, t

... See more

Everything about him was peculiar, starting with motives—or at least what he believed his motives to be. He didn’t come right out with all of it on our walk, maybe because he realized how implausible it’d sound to a total stranger. He needed infinity dollars because he planned to address the biggest existential risks to life on earth: nuclear war,

... See more

That day—the morning I turned up at his desk and took an inventory—wild shit was happening. Elon Musk was buying Twitter and Sam had been on the phone with one of Musk’s advisors, Igor Kurganov. Kurganov was a Russian-born former professional poker player to whom Musk had entrusted the task, it was reported, of giving away more than $5 billion wort

... See more

Only after CZ turned him down did Sam decide to create an exchange himself. The idea was simple: the first crypto futures exchange that was well enough designed that it would serve the needs not just of crypto people but also of big professional traders, like Jane Street. Still, Sam was deeply uneasy about it. “We were going to build a product that

... See more