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

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?