Michael Lewis | |
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Born | New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. | October 15, 1960
Occupation | Nonfiction writer, journalist |
Alma mater | Princeton University (BA) London School of Economics (MA) |
Period | 1989–present |
Notable works |
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Spouse | |
Website | |
michaellewiswrites |
Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) [1] [2] is an American author and financial journalist. [3] He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.
Lewis was born in New Orleans and attended Princeton University, from which he graduated with a degree in art history. After attending the London School of Economics, he began a career on Wall Street during the 1980s as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. The experience prompted him to write his first book, Liar's Poker (1989). Fourteen years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics. His 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game was his first to be adapted into a film, The Blind Side (2009). In 2010, he released The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine . The film adaptation of Moneyball was released in 2011, followed by The Big Short in 2015.
Lewis's books have won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and several have reached number one on the New York Times Bestsellers Lists , including his most recent book, Going Infinite (2023). [4]
Lewis was born in New Orleans, the son of corporate attorney J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. [5] He went to Isidore Newman School. He later attended Princeton University and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in art and archaeology in 1982 after completing a 166-page senior thesis titled "Donatello and the Antique." [6] At Princeton, Lewis was a member of the Ivy Club. [1] He briefly worked with New York City art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Lewis said that his initial ambition was to become an art historian, but he was quickly dissuaded once he realized that there would be no jobs available for art historians and that even the handful that existed did not pay well. [7]
Lewis subsequently enrolled at the London School of Economics and received an MA in economics in 1985. [8] [9] He was hired by Salomon Brothers, stayed for a while in New York for its training program, and then relocated to London, where he worked at its London office as a bond salesman for a few years. [10] He has said that the journalism from this era found in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal inspired him to explore becoming a writer. [11]
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and the obsession with innovation. Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds, "In Nature's Casino", that ran in The New York Times Magazine . [12]
Lewis has worked for The Spectator , [2] The New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic , [13] and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the Dad Again column for Slate . Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio, but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair , where he became a contributing editor. [14] [15]
In September 2011, after the successful release of the film adaptation of Moneyball, it was reported that Lewis planned to take on "a much more active role in the what could be the next film based on one of his books" and would start writing a script for a Liar's Poker film. [16] [17]
During 2013 in Vanity Fair, Lewis wrote on the injustice of the prosecution of ex-Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, [18] who is given an entire chapter in Flash Boys . [19] Flash Boys, which looked at high-frequency trading of Wall Street and other markets, was released in March 2014. [20]
In 2016, Lewis published The Undoing Project , chronicling the close academic collaboration and personal relationship between Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The duo found systemic errors in human judgment under uncertainty, with implications for models of decision-making in fields such as economics, medicine, and sports.
In 2017, Lewis wrote a series of articles for Vanity Fair in which he described the Trump administration's approach to various federal agencies, including the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. His articles described a sense of incredulity and disillusionment from career civil servants, particularly because of the Trump administration's lack of attention to some of their work, and the lack of care, knowledge, experience, and respect from Trump political appointees. [21]
That material was incorporated into Lewis's book The Fifth Risk , which was on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for 14 weeks, [22] and described the disconnect between the Obama administration's well-prepared transition plans and the incoming Trump administration's apparent lack of concern. Along with Energy and Agriculture, this book added Commerce among the main departments described.
In September 2018, The Guardian published an excerpt from the book, using a quote by Trump advisor Steve Bannon in its title: "This Guy Doesn't Know Anything". The excerpt was republished again among a review of the most popular articles of the year. [23]
In 2018, Lewis wrote and narrated The Coming Storm for Audible Studios, which released the short nonfiction story as part of its new Audible Originals series of audiobooks. [24]
In 2023, he wrote Going Infinite , about the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. [25] [26]
Lewis's podcast, Against the Rules, first aired on April 2, 2019. [27] The first season comprised seven episodes, each taking on a different aspect of society addressing the concept of fairness "in realms ranging from art authentication to consumer finance". [28] [29] The show often refers to the growing social distrust for authority, [30] and refers to different types of public officials as "referees." [31] Against the Rules is produced by Pushkin Industries, the media company founded by journalist Malcolm Gladwell and former Slate executive Jacob Weisberg.
On January 12, 2020, Lewis appeared as one of the castaways on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs . [32]
In a review of Moneyball, Dan Ackman of Forbes said that Lewis had a special talent: "He can walk into an area already mined by hundreds of writers and find gems there all along but somehow missed by his predecessors". [33] A New York Times piece said that "no one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis", praising his ability to use his subject's stories to show the problems with the systems around them. [34]
Critics from outside the financial industry have criticized Lewis for what they consider inaccuracies in his writing. In a 2011 column in The Atlantic , American journalist and sports author Allen Barra took issue with Lewis's characterization of Major League Baseball in Moneyball, writing, "From a historical standpoint, Lewis is, well, way off base. By the end of the 20th century baseball had achieved a greater level of competitive balance than at any time in the game's history... Moneyball doesn't just get the state of present-day baseball wrong; it also misrepresents the history of the sport." [35]
Lewis's Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt ignited a new round of controversy surrounding high-frequency trading. At a House Financial Services Committee hearing in April 2014, Mary Jo White, a former Wall Street insider (as a Debevoise & Plimpton lawyer primarily for Wall Street financial firms) [36] who later served as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair, denied the book's premise, saying, "The markets are not rigged". [37] In June 2014, White announced that the SEC would undergo a new round of regulatory review in response to concerns about dark pools and market structure. [38]
Book critics widely praised Lewis's The Undoing Project , [39] with Glenn C. Altschuler writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that it "may well be his best book". [40]
His 2023 book Going Infinite, an intimate account of Sam Bankman-Fried and his firm FTX, was written while FTX was collapsing and published the day Bankman-Fried's trial on charges of fraud and money laundering began. Lewis was criticized for giving Bankman-Fried's explanations for FTX's losses excessive deference, with journalist Michael Hiltzik calling the Bankman-Fried hype a "torrent of nonsense". The New York Times wrote of Lewis's extensive access to Bankman-Fried that he had "a front-row seat—from which he could apparently see nothing." [41] [42] [43] Others praised Lewis's storytelling, with The New Yorker calling the book "stupefyingly pleasurable" to read and filling "many gaps" in the story, ultimately predicting that the book "may one day be regarded as either the pinnacle or the nadir of his career". [44]
Lewis has been married three times. He married his first wife, Diane de Cordova Lewis, in 1985. [1] His second marriage was to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner; they got engaged three weeks after their first date. [45] [46] [47] In October 1997, he married former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren. She gave birth to his three children, daughters Quinn and Dixie, followed by son Walker. [48] [49] In 2021, their middle child, daughter Dixie, was a passenger in a head-on collision with a semi truck near Truckee, California; the driver, her boyfriend, had inexplicably crossed the median. Both Dixie and her boyfriend were pronounced dead at the scene. [50]
Lewis and Soren reside in the Oakland Hills above Berkeley, California. [51] [52]
Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. The book captures an important period in the history of Wall Street. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers' mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm's CEO John Gutfreund.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an associate professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. He co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better (2015) and What We Owe the Future (2022), and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty (2020).
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World is a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis about macroeconomic consequences of cheap financing available during the 2000s. The book was released on October 3, 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company.
Barbara Helen Fried is an American lawyer and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. She is also the mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is an MIT graduate, entrepreneur, and convicted felon.
Alan Joseph Bankman is an American lawyer, Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School, and psychologist. He was also employed at FTX, the cryptocurrency company founded by his son, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is an MIT graduate, entrepreneur, and convicted felon. His tenure at FTX lasted until the company's bankruptcy and subsequent collapse in 2022.
Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, or SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a "poster boy" for crypto. At the peak of his success, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400.
FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a fraud-ridden cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. At its peak in July 2021, the company had over one million users and was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. FTX is incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda and headquartered in the Bahamas. FTX is closely associated with FTX.US, a separate exchange available to US residents.
Puck is an American digital media company founded in 2021. Puck's coverage aims to cover the 'four centers of power' in the United States: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street.
Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara Mac Aulay.
BlockFi was a digital asset lender founded by Zac Prince and Flori Marquez in 2017. It was based in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was once valued at $3 billion.
Caroline Ellison is an American former business executive and quantitative trader who served as the CEO of Alameda Research, the trading firm affiliated with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and founded by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. In 2022, she pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges related to her role at Alameda Research.
Mark P. Wetjen is an American lawyer. In 2011, he was nominated by Barack Obama to serve a five-year term as a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). He also served for five months as acting chairman of the CFTC upon the departure of his predecessor, Gary Gensler.
The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX’s accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.
Brett Harrison is an American business executive, entrepreneur, and software developer. He is the founder and CEO of derivatives brokerage and trading technology firm Architect Financial Technologies.
Gary Wang is an American computer programmer who co-founded the crypto currency exchange FTX with Sam Bankman-Fried. At the height his success in 2022, Wang was ranked the 227th richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 431st richest person in the world by The World's Billionaires. After FTX collapsed into bankruptcy, caused by massive fraud perpetrated by Wang and a few others, Wang plea bargained a guilty charge in exchange for testifying against his former college roommate and business partner, Bankman-Fried. Before co-founding FTX, Wang worked at Google Flights, building systems for the aggregation of ticket prices.
Michael Kives is a Canadian investor and former talent agent; he is known for his extensive network and influential connections.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon is a 2023 book by Michael Lewis about Sam Bankman-Fried, a fraudster who founded the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The book's publication date, October 3, 2023, coincided with the beginning of Bankman-Fried's trial on seven counts of fraud and money laundering. On November 2, 2023, in the case of United States v. Bankman-Fried, Bankman-Fried was convicted of all seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.
United States of America v. Samuel Bankman-Fried was a 2023 federal criminal trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Financial entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, was convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy following the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November 2022.
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(help)A former Goldman Sachs computer programmer convicted of stealing source code from the firm was sentenced on Friday to more than eight years in prison, capping a case that had shone a rare spotlight on the world of lightning-fast computer-driven trading.