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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?
Stealing the Future nails Sam Bankman-Fried for what he truly is: an overly-confident, ineffective and amoral narcissist. But more than this, David Z. Morris situates SBF as the logical outcome of the convoluted utilitarian ethics of the Effective Altruism movement and the warped incentives of Silicon Valley culture more broadly.
Sam Bankman-Fried was Bernie Madoff cosplaying as Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Too many people who should have known better fell for his act, enabling one of the largest financial frauds in American history. The inimitable David Z. Morris offers a high-minded take on this tragic farce, exploring the wide-eyed philosophies that SBF used (and perhaps twisted) to rationalize his destructive behavior.
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.
