THE MONEY TRAP

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 idées 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.