Stealing the Future

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?