Where was OJ? Michael Lewis, from football to finance in the early 2000s, or “My Crazy-Ass Summer With OJ”?
Imagine if you will, that a popular and successful journalist embedded himself in the world of OJ Simpson in 1994. Imagine that this writer had been reporting an uplifting rags-to-riches biography of the famous football player for months, only to find himself hunched over scribbling notes in the back of a white Ford Bronco gunning it down the freeway after the genre of Simpson’s life story jumped abruptly from sports to true crime. Imagine that Simpson had continued to confide in him from jail. Gobsmacking access. Imagine that after the book was released, the two people fighting over jury selection were the same person. Imagine, in other words, the luckiest journalist in the world.
This was never actually something that happened. My Crazy-Ass Summer With OJ is a blockbuster according to some other universe. But something similar—the financial-world version of the above events, basically—has happened to Michael Lewis. Sam Bankman-Fried lost his fortune through his now-bankrupt FTX exchange, and he’s the author of the new book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. for the wildest financial fiasco in contemporary history.
The chronicler of market mismanagement in the US has been Lewis since 1989 with his semi-autobiographical debut, Liar’s Poker. His crowning achievement is 2010’s The Big Short, which turned the subprime mortgage crisis from a few years prior into an instant-classic thriller. Being at the right place at the right time is a talent, of course, one Lewis has honed over the years. His reputation is gilded. (Other stuff of his is probably gilded, too, considering he used to make $10 a word writing for magazines, and his work has been adapted into several major Hollywood hits.)
The public reaction to learning that Lewis and Bankman-Fried were involved in the collapse of the technology industry was that of sheer joy. It was assumed he’d get the goods. Apple was so confident it reportedly paid $5 million for the rights to Lewis’ account before it even existed. Michael hadn’t written anything yet, but the story had grown too big for us to wait for, so he shopped the project around in November 2022.
The SBF saga shows how fast fortunes can change. This summer, the subjects of Lewis’ book The Blind Side got into an ugly dispute, one which punctured the book’s uplifting story about a poor Black teenager getting adopted by a wealthy white family and nurtured into an athletic star. The Tuohy family had lied to Michael Oher and profited off of a sham relationship, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit cast a shadow over The Blind Side—Lewis had portrayed the Tuohys as Oher’s rescuers and champions—and then Lewis has made things worse for himself by insinuating that Oher is acting this way because he sustained brain damage playing football.
It’s true that Lewis does not insist upon his subject’s criminality. He is willing to let Bankman-Fried prove that the huge money loss was due to carelessness rather than malice. Still, Going Infinite is not actually the work of drooling credulity that Lewis’ most astringent critics see it as. Overall, it portrays Bankman-Fried as an arrogant weirdo who leans into his personal eccentricities to distract from his moral slipperiness. Lewis quotes his former FTX COO as saying that Bankman- Fried was a fraud and that he uses the excuse “I really don’t have a soul” to argue against committing to her. (“He has absolutely zero empathy.”)
The main problem with Going Infinite is that it neglects to close with something like that, because he was definitely a bad guy. The real problem is that it simply doesn’t deliver on its supposedly revelatory potential.
The Genesis Project: The First Trial of Bankman-Fried’s Misuse of Customer Deposits and Operating Under the Influence of FTX
A former employee of Genesis says she is not the only one who believes this is just one very big distraction. The sooner the industry is able to move beyond the “galactic embarrassment of FTX,” she says, the better. “It’s about starting again once [the trial] is done.”
The first of two trials, Bankman-Fried is facing seven counts of fraud. He was accused by the US Department of Justice of misappropriating billions of dollars’ worth of customer deposits and lying about the way his business operated.