Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia

by David Morris

Overview

When does a philosophy become a conspiracy?

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider - but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. "Effective Altruism" and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today's Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried's pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart of OpenAI, the tech darling that took FTX's place as the face of the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781917516082
Publisher:	Watkins Media
Publication date:	11/11/2025
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.15(d)

About the Author

David Z. Morris is one of the most respected and longstanding journalists covering cryptocurrency. He was part of the team at CoinDesk that exposed and brought down Sam Bankman-Fried. As a staff writer at Fortune he coveredTesla and a variety of tech firms, and has written about technology for The Atlantic, Slate, and Aeon.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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."
– 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

From the Publisher