When I first read about the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the arrest last December of its then 30-year-old billionaire CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried , my immediate thought was: “Well, there’s a story for Michael Lewis.” Because who else apart from Lewis – the author of Liar’s Poker, The Big Short and Flash Boys – with his uncanny gift for finding human tales in the opaque machinations of the world’s money markets, could do full justice to Bankman-Fried’s mythological catastrophe?
The curious thing, as it turned out, was that I was not alone in that thought. It seems Sam Bankman-Fried had it too. In April 2022, he effectively gave Lewis the journalistic keys to his kingdom. The exact motivation for that invitation is not quite explained here, though you suspect Bankman-Fried understood that Lewis was perhaps the only writer around who could unravel the extreme financial fantasy land he had willed into life and explain it to the world.
