“Is it weird I have this urge to say sorry for your loss?” a source-friend texted me last week as Sam Bankman-Fried began his catatonic implosion. My bud, like the half-dozen other people who wrote me with similar notes over the last few days, was of course just giving me shit. But I have charted the rise of S.B.F. and his kin closely over the last three years, and so there is an element of something lost here—although, of course, the narrative of S.B.F. has never been as astonishing. 

I first talked to Sam Bankman-Fried in late 2020 when I saw that he was a major donor to a new, somewhat mysterious super PAC, Future Forward, that I was following closely that cycle. He and I talked off the record, but it was clear even then that he was seriously considering becoming a major player in Democratic big-money politics. A few months later I published one of the first interviews with him, where he explained his goal to maximize his net worth, his distaste for CSR programming, and his desire to help Joe Biden think about crypto.