Michael Lewis.
MICHAEL LEWIS: SAM BANKMAN-FRIED BIOGRAPHY
GOING INFINITE: THE RISE AND FALL OF A NEW TYCOON (2023)
A New York Times No.1 best seller.
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Sam Bankman-Fried (born 1992) is an American entrepreneur who funded the crypto currency exchange FTX. In 2023 he was convicted on sevent counts of money laundering, consipiracy, and fraud. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Bankman-Fried has led a life stranger than fiction. He is the son of two professors at Stanford Law School; he attended MIT where he obtained a degree in physics and mathematics. His first job after college was at Jane Street Capital, a Wall Street trading firm. He then moved to California, working briefly at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He then moved into bit coin trading, founding the FTX crypto currency exchange in 2018. He moved the business first to Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas. It was later discovered that Bankman-Fried had considered buying the island country of Nauru to use as a refuge in the event of nuclear armageddon. In November 2022 his world crashed around him as FTX and more than 130 associated companies declared bankruptcy.
In its review of the book, the New Yorker wrote: ‘Going Infinite is a stupefyingly pleasurable book to read. It’s perfectly paced, extremely funny, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting... What he began with Moneyball has come into full flower with Going Infinite. Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized, at least here and there, by uneven and unreliable information. Perhaps Lewis’s book should encourage an update, however minuscule, in our own priors.’ The New Statesman wrote: ‘Michael Lewis has an uncanny instinct for a big story, and is now right in the thick of the action again... Reading Lewis can feel like being a passenger in an expertly piloted bobsleigh. You’re moving so fast down the mountain, but you know you’re going to be delivered safe and sound – hot chocolate waiting at the bottom. There is no need to stress, only to thrill to the scenery as it hurtles past.’
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Michael Lewis (born 1960) is a journalist and author, writing mostly on economics, finance and business. Born in New Orleans, he attended Princeton University, gaining a degree in art history. He obtained an MA at the London School of Economics, and joined Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman on Wall Street. His first book, Liar’s Poker, described his Wall Street experiences; it has been followed by several other highly successful books.
