In early 2022, when FTX was growing exponentially and his own powers seemed virtually limitless, Sam Bankman-Fried offered what is some of the best insight into his mathematical, sometimes alien view of the world. “Let’s say there’s a game,” the economist Tyler Cowen asked him in an interview. “51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?” S.B.F. responded, essentially, that of course he would keep flipping that coin, forever and ever if he could. Sure, he might destroy the world, but he also might double it, whatever the hell that means, entering into “an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.”