The long read: As author of The Big Short and Moneyball, Michael Lewis is perhaps the most celebrated chronicler of his generation. Now he delivers an astonishing portrait of the fallen crypto billionaire. But did he get too close?
As author of The Big Short and Moneyball, Michael Lewis is perhaps the most celebrated journalist of his generation. Now he delivers an astonishing portrait of the fallen crypto billionaire. But did he get too close?ight around the time the gales of the financial crisis were tearing up Wall Street in 2009, Meredith Whitney started her own financial research firm.
Lewis and his wife, Tabitha Soren, a former reporter for MTV News, bought this house in 1998, when he was 38. They’d left New York, in part, because the city jangled his nerves, but also because he wanted to escape Wall Street’s fallout zone. For a while, he wondered if they ought to move to New Orleans, where he grew up, but then decided that it was unfair to pitch her into its stratified, ossified urban hierarchy. Lewis’s family sat at the very top of thearistocracy in New Orleans.
For Lewis, who wasn’t otherwise drawn to crypto, Bankman-Fried exerted a magnetic appeal. His net worth was a part of it, although there were other, wealthier people out there, like Elon Musk, whom Lewis couldn’t imagine himself writing about. He did find himself intrigued, in particular, by, the movement to which Bankman-Fried subscribed.
Sometimes, Lewis even creates these ties himself, to the extent that he becomes a minor participant in the stories he’s researching. When he was following Katsuyama’s efforts to get his stock exchange off the ground, Lewis brokered an introduction to Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape and the central figure in Lewis’s The New New Thing. Clark went on to invest in Katsuyama’s company.
This past August, though, Oher sued the Tuohys, claiming that they’d made millions off the film while he had received nothing. He also accused the Tuohys of lying about having adopted him, claiming that they’d actually brought him into a conservatorship when he was in school, giving them the legal right to make business deals on his behalf.
Lewis has all the receipts. He discovers Bankman-Fried’s inability to lead a regular life – one involving sleep and clean clothes – and his imposition of the same kind of existence upon his employees. He learns how, after starting a crypto trading firm called Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried misplaced $4m worth of a token called Ripple, only to find it again.
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