Alumna Elizabeth Bachmann ’21 released her debut book in September about the FTX cryptocurrency scandal.
Bachmann cowrote “Crypto Crackup: Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, and Bankman-Fried’s Weird Island Empire” with Ash Bennington and Artur Osiński. The book explores the rise and fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who managed a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange with his company but was arrested in the Bahamas last year on charges including wire fraud and money laundering, according to CBS News.
“It was really crazy to spend the first couple of weeks doing so much research about crypto, Sam, and FTX and what crypto trading even is,” Bachmann said.
While at Hillsdale, Bachmann majored in English and minored in journalism and was the features editor of The Collegian. After graduating from Hillsdale, Bachmann became a writer and editor for First Things magazine before starting her current position as director of production at Encounter Books.
Associate Professor of English Dwight Lindley said he thinks the skills students like Bachmann develop at Hillsdale prepare them well for the real world.
“I remember working with her on writing papers and she really enjoyed thinking through long theoretical lines of inquiry, so much that I remember thinking ‘is she going to be an English major or a philosophy major?’ She ended up being an English major, but she has a philosophical mind.”
John J. Miller, director of the Dow Journalism Program and one of Bachmann’s former professors, said he remembers her as a great writer who continued to improve after graduation.
“I wasn’t surprised to see her name on a book cover, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” he said. “Elizabeth has a bright future in journalism and publishing, and the release of this new book makes it even brighter.”
Bachmann said the book tells the story of Bankman-Fried chronologically through straight journalism.
“I didn’t think I was going to find this as interesting as I did, but Sam Bankman is this really crazy character,” Bachmann said. “He grew up on the Stanford campus and his parents were professors.”
Bachmann said she believed Bankman’s upbringing influenced his actions as the CEO of FTX.
“His dad is a professed utilitarian and his mother was a consequentialist and a determinist, and he grew up with utilitarianism as his religion in a sense,” Bachmann said. “I think he’s guilty, but I think that a lot of his motivation to start out was truly altruistic.”
Bachmann said the book examines Bankman-Fried’s move toward effective altruism and his attempts to make as much money as possible.
Effective altruism, Bachmann said, is a philosophy developed from the writings of Australian philosopher Peter Singer in the 2000s, which says you have an obligation to help others with the goal of net quantity of happiness.
“He was trying to create a secular morality essentially built around rationality, and so he’ll say things like ‘it’s morally wrong not to kill a child that has a disability,’” Bachmann said.
Bachmann said Bankman-Fried was motivated by these principles from a young age.
“In high school, he wrote all these blog posts about how he was utilitarian and how he wanted to maximize happiness in the world,” Bachmann said.
Bankman-Fried demonstrated the principles of effective altruism through his early work for animal welfare, becoming vegan and donating 50% of his salary to animal welfare causes after graduating MIT, according to Bachmann.
“The thing about Sam Bankman-Fried is that I think he started out with genuinely good intentions but those intentions became corrupted through fame and power,” Bachmann said.
Bachmann said Bankman-Fried focused later in his career on a philosophy within effective altruism called long termism.
“It says rationally there’s going to be more people alive in the future than there are now,” Bachmann said. “If you want to help the most people you need to be thinking about all of the future generations and not the people who are currently alive.”
This shift of philosophy marked a shift in Bankman-Fried’s career, according to Bachmann.
“He’s following the secular morality where the only barometer of good and evil is pleasure or pain, that’s what effective altruism comes from,” Bachmann said. “It goes to show you that, even for people with the best intentions, without God, without following some higher transcendent law for what is good and evil, human beings get lost.”
The book concludes with Bankman-Fried on house arrest in Palo Alto.
Bachmann said she found being a co-author challenging.
“I ended up having two co-authors at the end of the day,” Bachmann said. “And we had very different visions for the way the book was going to be written. That was hard but it taught me a lot about collaborative writing and to be very sure that you know what your coauthors vision is.”
Bachmann said the process taught her a lot.
“I feel like I’m a different person after the book than I was before I wrote the book,” Bachmann said. “It taught me to check my pride about how good a writer I was and realize that as good of a writer as you are in the journalistic world, you have to get stuff right in the first place.”
