From GE to FTX, beware the Icarus complex

to think of two more different firms than , a once-exalted symbol of American inventiveness, and , a Bahamas-based fly-by-night crypto exchange. Besides high-pitched voices, it is hard to think of two people with less in common than the late , ’s legendary former , and Sam Bankman-Fried, ’s disgraced founder. The former, son of working-class parents, was fiendishly competitive about profits, had a frat-boy approach to life, and was as much at home on a golf course as he was on the factory floor. The latter, son of Stanford law professors, is scruffy, nerdy, a player of “League of Legends”, and claims to be motivated to make money only so that he can give it away. Yet there is one big thing they share, and it’s not just a love of expletives: “I fucked up, I fucked up,” admits Welch, with tears in his eyes, at the start of a monumental new book by William Cohan on the rise and fall of , published on November 15th. “I fucked up, and should have done better,” tweeted Mr Bankman-Fried a few days earlier, as his crypto empire, once worth $32bn, crashed around his ears, leaving some 1m creditors out of pocket.