Since 2023, disgraced crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been incarcerated; first in Brooklyn, then in two federal prisons in California as part of a 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy. Throughout, he has maintained his innocence. He has also, in his way, adapted to life on the inside. This is the fascinating core of Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s feature, which draws on countless conversations with the man corrections officers call “Bankman,” as well as a litany of his past and present fellow inmates. You may have read prison narratives before, but I’d bet few of them involved this much pickleball.
Despite his fear of becoming an Innie, Bankman-Fried found his own ways to wall himself off from reminders of the outside world, which he called “cracks in the blinds.” In addition to Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Bankman-Fried’s forms of diversion included a two-person spadeslike card game he and Simpson invented called Churchill and Ping-Pong matches against Hernández. Prison boredom also forced Bankman-Fried to abandon his infamous prejudice against books, most of which he believes should be no longer than blog posts. The books he reads are escapist. Relatively early in his incarceration, he estimated he had read 13 books about Navy SEALs, 27 space operas, 12 fantasy novels, two true-crime books, and one romance novel. Reminders of anything real were unwelcome. Once, Simpson handed Bankman-Fried a copy of Wired that mentioned him. “That sucked. I read an article about Elon and Grimes; that sucked, too.”
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