Sublime

One other oddly big thing happened to Sam at the beginning of his junior year. Completely out of the blue, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University named Will Crouch* reached out and asked to meet with him. Sam never learned how the guy had found him—probably from the writing Sam had been doing on various utilitarian messa

When we meet the boy for the first time, we described him as wearing a black t-shirt and sporting a wispy soul-patch on his chin. Emblematically it fit, showing his yearning to be hip and older on the inside and not quite cutting it in his appearance.

From the moment he had started on the project and begun to observe Sam from afar, Ian had found the same thought often crossing his mind: how shockingly just like he’d been in high school Sam still was. When the oddball in your high school class became one of the richest people in the world, you sort of assumed the oddball must have changed. Sam ha

In their day jobs, his parents continually wrestled with the tension, in American law, between individual freedoms and the collective good. Both identified, broadly speaking, as utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number. They never pushed their views on Sam

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