The Money Trap

August 1, 2024
Finance whiz and hedge fund trader Sama recounts a far from ordinary stint in the C-suite. Sama opens with a scenario worthy of a Matt Damon hero: threatened with blackmail by an unnamed bad guy, he connects with two ex-Mossad agents in downtown London who deliver the news that "there is a conspiracy to remove you from your job" and demand a cool million bucks to make it go away. Go away it does not, and Sama's narrative is peppered with ulcer-inducing moments trying to dodge the unknown threat. There's big money at stake: Sama is a key advisor to Japanese investor Masayoshi Son, who has $100 billion at his disposal. Sama had had sightings of Son in earlier jobs: in the mid-1990s, Son, for instance, had thrown $100 million at Yahoo, which turned in $30 billion before the tech bubble burst. Feeling undervalued at Morgan Stanley--"I should have walked away, but I didn't," he writes. "Nobody does; nobody walks out of the money trap"--Sama gladly went to work for Son, only to discover that megazillionaires can be odd ducks with id�es fixes that don't always pay off in reality. In Son's case, he was smitten by Adam Neumann's WeWork, which, on paper at least, aligned with Son's own mantra, "My goal is happiness for everyone. Nobody should be sad. I want technology to make people happy." Son's seed money certainly made many a tech startup happy, especially in the ride-share space, although many ventures failed to come through. With billions of dollars swirling around his narrative, Sama is a helpful interpreter of how such things as derivatives and Amazon's "consumer value proposition" work--or don't. Throughout, he is an engagingly funny, self-aware, and often rueful narrator. A sometimes bumpy but always thrilling ride on the high-finance roller coaster.

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September 23, 2024
In this wry debut, Sama—the former CFO of investment firm SoftBank—offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the crushing world of corporate finance. Skipping back and forth in time, Sama covers his arc from theorem-solving college student to right-hand aide to tech investor Masayoshi Son. Along the way, Sama describes how he brokered deals with some of the world’s largest companies while gradually coming to learn that a hefty income can’t insulate him from life’s difficulties. His greatest strength as a writer is the way he grounds the glitz of his professional life with gritty personal stakes: he ruminates on the gap between himself and his social media–skeptical son, then smoothly transitions to a dinner with Mark Zuckerberg. Elsewhere, he effectively juxtaposes his attempts to fight off a smear campaign designed to remove him from SoftBank with his grief over his parents’ deaths. Less successful are the book’s granular descriptions of NASDAQ numbers and the mechanics of finance, which are likely to lose all but the most well-versed readers. In the end, it’s the smear campaign, during which business rivals surveil and threaten Sama’s family, that drives him out of tech investment and reminds him that “money doesn’t give you control, it buys you a nicer coat.” In Sama’s hands, that feels like revolutionary advice. Agent: Lynn Johnston, Lynn Johnston Literary.