Michael Lewis Speaks Out After Sam Bankman-Fried Furor
Michael Lewis, the financial journalist who wrote a controversial book about the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, says the former crypto kingpin’s crime “still makes no sense.”
Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March after being convicted of a colossal fraud in which he stole $8 billion of customers’ deposits from his FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Going Infinite, the book that Lewis wrote about Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, was published on the day that jurors were selected for SBF’s trial in October 2023.
At the time of the book’s release, some reviewers criticized Lewis—the author of hugely successful works including The Big Short and Moneyball—for being overly sympathetic to Bankman-Fried, with a Guardian review going so far as accusing him of having developed an “misguided soft spot” for his protagonist.