Did Michael Lewis’s reputation ‘crash’ by showing mercy to SBF?

Did Michael Lewis's reputation suffer when he showed mercy to SBF?

Source: The New York Times

Translation: LianGuaiBitpushNews Mary Liu

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Hiking is Michael Lewis’ preferred form of interview. At the end of 2021, when he first met FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) in California, he took SBF, who was wearing work shorts, for a walk in the eucalyptus forest near his home in Berkeley.

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According to Lewis, SBF was out of breath even during a simple hike. The young billionaire talked about his cryptocurrency trading and effective altruism, leaving Lewis “jaw-dropped.”

SBF co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund Alameda with FTX. Lewis was shocked by the numbers that came out of SBF’s mouth. SBF described the valuation of his exchange (he claimed it would take $100 billion to buy his shares) and the size of the cryptocurrency market at the time (over $2 trillion).

Lewis said, “This is news to me,” as he hadn’t been closely following cryptocurrencies. He asked if he could follow SBF around and observe his life. “He blinked and said, okay.”

About two years later, on the same path where Lewis walked with SBF, he told me that he was preparing to publish his new book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.” On the day the book was released, it was also the first day SBF was being tried in New York City on federal fraud charges.

As we walked, I looked up and saw a sign with the name of this path: Wildcat Gorge. For speculators, it sounded like some kind of trap, which was one of the nearly perfect Easter eggs in Michael Lewis’ book.

As it turned out, my hiking experience with Lewis/SBF was not exclusive. The writer understood the importance of the scene. During the promotion of his new book, he told the story of his first meeting with SBF to reporters from 60 Minutes and The Guardian. (This hiking trip was also mentioned in Lewis’ character column in New York Magazine in 2011.)

Lewis wore a waist pack and had on deep gray Hoka shoes, of which he had about a dozen pairs. When a few hikers passed by us, he blinked and said, “You go ahead – we’re talking about confidential topics,” and the hikers politely smiled.

For Lewis, the publication of this new book came at a complicated moment.

“Going Infinite” is his daughter Dixie’s first book, written in 2021 after she died in a car accident. The book is dedicated to her.

In August, Lewis documented the rise of African-American football player Michael Oher in “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game” from 2006. Oher sued his white foster parents, the Tuohys, who took him out of the “ghetto,” where he was poor and had poor grades, and brought him into their home, paid for his tuition at a private high school, where he played offensive tackle. Oher’s life seemed so smooth in Lewis’ book, and he eventually got admitted to the University of Mississippi, which happened to be the alma mater of the Tuohys.

(Michael Oher’s foster father, Sean Tuohy, happened to be a childhood friend of Lewis.)

The 2009 film adaptation also earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy and became the most rented DVD in Netflix history.

Now, Michael Oher accuses his family of stealing his movie royalties, prompting some readers to reconsider Lewis’s narrative, saying that Lewis’s writing leans more towards the foster parents’ perspective rather than Oher’s.

“The Infinite Walk” is also controversial. Lewis typically avoids writing books about already famous figures. And this time, he thought that a likable and relatively marginal character (Lewis had hardly heard of SBF before the walk) had become the object of public condemnation, the main antagonist of the entire crypto industry.

So what happens when a writer accustomed to warm reception and storytelling abilities conflicts with a reality script he can’t control?

To judge or not to judge?

62-year-old Lewis is indeed fortunate in his career.

Since gaining fame at the age of 29 with the publication of his Wall Street memoir “Liar’s Poker” in 1989, he has become a titan of non-fiction bestsellers, with books being written and films being made one after another: such as “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” which tells the story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt); “The Big Short,” starring Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, which tells the story of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and the bubble economy.

His achievements seem effortless, and for some reason, he always appears at the right place at the right time.

“The Infinite Walk” seems to be another such miracle. Last November, after tracking SBF for several months and interviewing his parents, friends, and colleagues, Lewis conducted character research and collected a series of interesting anecdotes, but the direction of the story changed.

But that’s okay because he doesn’t have the pressure to submit the manuscript by a specific date. After the success of “The Big Short” in 2010, Lewis no longer receives book advances. He splits the final profit with the publisher.

He said, “I always leave myself the ability to withdraw at any time.” (After “Moneyball,” he spent three years researching a project about minor league baseball players before ultimately giving up.)

Feeling stuck, he sought advice from a film director friend who often helps him brainstorm ideas.

Lewis said, “He said to me, ‘Dude, this is awesome. But it’s not a movie because there is no ending, no third act.’ But everything changed two days later.”

After FTX’s inability to pay its customers billions of dollars was exposed, FTX collapsed, SBF was detained, and then placed under house arrest. Nevertheless, this fallen cryptocurrency prodigy continued to allow Lewis to interview him and even attended meetings with his closest advisors.

In the book, Lewis carefully avoids commenting on whether SBF committed any crimes. He said, “I leave it to the readers, the most fundamental thing here is to preserve judgment.”

He does have his own viewpoint – “If I were a juror, I wouldn’t just remain silent,” he said – but for now, he remains silent.

In his writing, he sometimes seems to give up his position as a neutral observer, which allows people to grasp at his attempt to exonerate SBF.

Recently, 60 Minutes released a segment about the book, in which Lewis called FTX a “great, real business” and casually referred to those who lost money in the collapse as “crypto speculators from the Bahamas,” which directly angered investors and some media commentators.

Influential cryptocurrency investigator Coffeezilla wrote, “Michael Lewis has lost his position.”

ProPublica editor Jesse Eisinger, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on practices before the Wall Street financial crisis, jokingly wrote, “Tired: Michael Lewis is lucky that SBF’s rampant and obvious fraud saved him from an idealized biography. It’s strange: in any case, he had to write a perfect persona biography!”

Lewis said he anticipated this kind of reaction. “Some people are threatened by the truth,” he said, “the whole story will severely disrupt their mental preconceptions. It’s a good thing for me that those who only know a small part of the truth are more eager than me to determine what happened. I have confirmed my suspicions, while they have not obtained certainty.”

Lewis’s description of SBF also raised questions about the author’s relationship with the interviewee. The risk of Lewis’s immersive process is that he will ultimately become “over-identified” with the characters he writes about. (After Lewis wrote an article about Senator John McCain, McCain referred to Lewis as his son.)

Lewis said he can only write books about people he likes. “If you tell me I have to write about Harvey Weinstein, I would say no. Why should I write about that?”

He said, “I don’t believe that a person is either a hero or a villain, I believe that great characters and interesting scenes can teach readers a lot.”

At least some readers seem to appreciate this approach and find the written work more substantial than Lewis’ theatrical interpretation.

After reading the book, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine asked Lewis about his involvement in the “Ponzi scheme” before SBF collapsed and wrote an article midway through. He said some comments complained that “Lewis did not fully explain that SBF was actually guilty and bad,” but that was not what Levine wanted to read.

He wrote, “If you want to read moral condemnation of crypto theft, you can find it anywhere. You read Michael Lewis for characters and stories.” He added that all the details in this book are made up of interviews, which is “very cool”.

Other journalists questioned whether Lewis’ relationship with SBF was too friendly. In a new book about the cryptocurrency bubble, Bloomberg investigative journalist Zeke Faux recounted Lewis’ “flattery” of Bankman-Fried during an onstage interview at the 2022 Crypto Bahamas conference.

When I mentioned this anecdote at lunch, Lewis asked in response, “Someone wrote a book trying to destroy it before a competitor’s book was published? That’s shocking. Talk about corruption! So who do I think is better, Sam or him? I have to think about that.”

Lewis said he gives dozens of speeches and moderates panel discussions every year, typically for $150,000, but he did not receive compensation from the Crypto Bahamas group. “I feel the same way about Sam as I do about anyone else. It’s just a pleasant social interaction.”

Lewis said this criticism is a good example of hindsight bias. “At the time, I seriously doubted whether he would view it the way he wrote it,” he said of Faux. “Or if Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth was still $100 billion and FTX was still hugely successful, no one would question this interaction again.”

Faux wrote in an email, “I stand by what I wrote.”

A walking social satire script

Lewis speaks with a broad New Orleans accent and is filled with boyish enthusiasm regardless of the topic. When I first walked into his office in Berkeley—a small wooden house in one of the four buildings he lives in—he immediately started telling stories, barely lifting his head from his phone, as if we were old friends. (He talked about his son, the Golden State Warriors, and some stadiums they were going to visit that night.)

Then he launched into a series of jokes about his high school baseball coach (the subject of his 2005 book “Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life”), the first fan email he received, and why he stopped subscribing to the American Library version (apparently, they no longer had any writers who could break through). It seems he will find a way to endlessly string stories together.

This is very similar to the way he operates when writing a book: the success of “The Poker Liar” allowed him to meet with traders he had spoken to about “The Big Short,” one of whom introduced him to the protagonist of “Flash Boys.”

Lewis said that in the fall of 2021, Brad Katsuyama, one of the “Flash Boys” newcomers seeking to offset the advantages of high-frequency traders, asked him to “investigate” SBF. Katsuyama is now his friend and was considering a deal with FTX at the time, but couldn’t understand the situation of its eccentric leader. (Katsuyama declined to comment.)

Lewis immediately liked SBF. Lewis said that although they were completely different on the surface – the explosion-haired boy wearing an oversized T-shirt, while Lewis preferred elegant linen materials – they both resisted dogma. SBF is the child of a Stanford law professor, who discussed utilitarianism at the dinner table as a child and wrote a blog about the San Francisco Giants during college. In a sense, SBF was the Michael Lewis who grew up in the laboratory.

In 2015, Lewis interviewed Brad Katsuyama, the protagonist of his “Flash Boys,” at the New York Stock Exchange.

Lewis was also attracted by the young man’s lofty dreams, from donating $1 billion to the 2024 presidential campaign to repaying Bahamian debts. According to the self-justifying principle of effective altruism, the more money SBF makes, the more good he can do.

Lewis said, “It feels like Ferris Bueller has $22.5 billion.”

What particularly interested him was the contrast between the seriousness of SBF’s stated purpose (saving humanity from extinction) and the dubious industry he was in.

The industry’s pursuit of SBF during its peak will only exacerbate this absurdity. In one of the early scenes in the book, he played video games with Anna Wintour during a video call, and Anna Wintour wanted him to sponsor the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s charity ball. Lewis said, “It’s like a walking social satire.”

Soon, the author began regularly visiting the Bahamas, hanging out with SBF and his colleagues Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang – all of whom have pleaded guilty and may be summoned to testify against their former bosses.

After a few visits, Lewis could browse through SBF’s desk files without blinking an eye. He would wander around the FTX conference room, and the staff would take turns being interviewed.

According to Lewis, sometimes he saw SBF more times than his parents saw him: “They have to go through his schedule to spend 15 minutes with him. And he often breaks appointments.”

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried received millions of dollars from their son (questioned to be from client funds). In the SBF case, they have done consulting work for FTX and also asked Lewis to help convey SBF’s message.

SBF even seeks Lewis’ advice on key decisions, including whether to invest in Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk. (Lewis refused.) “His parents would ask, ‘Did you tell him not to do this?'”

After FTX collapsed, some insiders like Ellison and Singh stopped interacting with Lewis after seeking legal advice. Other people became more important, including Constance Wang, former COO of FTX, who showed Lewis a large number of documents detailing company expenses and a list of creditors.

SBF is under house arrest at his parents’ home in LianGuailo Alto, California, an hour’s drive from Lewis.

Lewis says, “He can’t do anything except spend time with me. He’s happy for the company.”

Lewis said SBF’s parents were nervous about his presence from the beginning. But at some point, even if FTX collapsed, they believed the damage had already been done. Lewis said at an advisor meeting held at the family headquarters, a participant looked at him suspiciously, “Joe said, ‘It’s too late.’ If he wanted to kill us, he would have done it a long time ago.”

On November 11, the day FTX filed for bankruptcy, Matthew Snyder, an agent at Creative Artists Agency where Lewis works, sent an email announcing the availability of the film rights to Lewis’ new book, which was leaked to Hollywood media. Snyder wrote that the events of the previous week “highlighted the competition between SBF and Binance’s Zhao Changpeng,” who helped draw attention to the issues with FTX, and “Lewis compared them to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in the cryptocurrency world.” (Characters from the movie “Star Wars”)

Lewis denies that this was his initial metaphor for the book. “He’s just promoting the future movie,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”

This promotion was effective, and Apple purchased the rights for $5 million.

Lewis didn’t start writing until January, and the book needed to be completed by mid-August for publication when the SBF trial begins. Eight months is tight, but Lewis said he usually finishes writing in six months, and he finished “The Blind Side” in four months.

Revisiting “The Blind Side”

In the 2009 film adaptation of Lewis’ book “The Blind Side,” Quinton Aaron played Michael Oher and Sandra Bullock played Leigh Anne Tuohy.

Many of Lewis’s works have sparked similar criticisms: he presents a great story, but the world is more complex than he portrays. Did Sabermetrics, the baseball statistical analysis, really drive the Oakland Athletics to victory as implied in “Moneyball,” or was it simply their talented traditional scouts? When Wall Street’s “Flash Boys” outsmarted the manipulated high-frequency trading systems, were they rebellious moral exemplars or just clever individuals with commercial ideas?

In “The Blind Side,” did the Tuohy family truly display the courage depicted? This question resurfaced in August when Oher requested the Tennessee court to lift the Tuohy family’s 20-year guardianship and control over his finances (officially lifted last week). These allegations sparked a new round of comments on the exploitative nature of college football and the ongoing narrative of the “white savior.”

When we spoke, Lewis denied the claim that the Tuohy family controlled the 37-year-old Oher’s assets. He said, “I find that extremely defamatory,” and, “This child is fabricating nasty lies about people who have contributed a lot to him.”

Lewis stated that the only reason the Tuohy family (including Oher) received movie royalties was because he voluntarily shared half of his share “out of goodwill.” Lewis said the Tuohy family subsequently divided their shares equally within the family, with approximately $70,000 going to Oher.

According to Lewis, at some point, Oher launched an attack against the Tuohy family, claiming that he was entitled to one-third of the $300 million inheritance because he was mentioned in their will.

In 2013, Tuohy and her husband Sean

Lewis said, “He threatened them that if they didn’t write a $15 million check, he would destroy their reputation.”

“I don’t know what happened to him that made him feel this way,” Lewis said. He speculated to The Guardian, “This is what happens to football players who suffer head injuries: they encounter issues of violence and aggression.”

Lewis described the outcome as “heartbreaking” but stated that it did not change his view of the original story. He said, “I wouldn’t change a single word in that book.”

Painful Loss

In 2021, Lewis’s 19-year-old daughter Dixie Lee Lewis and her boyfriend Ross Schultz were killed in a car accident near Lake Tahoe.

After the accident, Lewis felt that he could no longer write. Readers who had lost children would write to him offering advice or saying they knew what he was going through, but these letters often sent chills down his spine.

He said, “One important theme is that you need to learn how to endure guilt,” but he feels no guilt.

Medication and religion are also of no help. He said, “I have always believed that talking to friends is better than talking to strangers.”

This limits his social circle to the closest circle, which includes Jacob Weisberg, co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries, who hosts shows for the company.

Jacob Weisberg said, “Lewis was once called a winner in life by his friends, but no one says that anymore.”

Lewis said that this disconnect between how he should feel and how he actually feels is often an opportunity: “This disconnect is the beginning of something to write about.” He said he might write a book about his deceased daughter or do a one-man show.

I asked Lewis if the death of his loved one affected the creation of his new book. He said no, but added that I’m not the first person to ask that question. He said the copy editor of The Infinite Game told him that after losing his daughter, he is writing characters in a more empathetic way. In fact, certain parts of this book, especially about SBF’s depression and alienation, have more emotional weight than anything in his previous works.

Lewis said, “Sometimes I feel like my daughter is still there, never left.”

The Vortex of Controversy

At a recent panel discussion on the new documentary about Tom Wolfe, Lewis compared himself to Wolfe (who has always had a feud with Norman Mailer and John Irving), saying, “He seeks a fight in an elegant way, but I don’t. I don’t like arguing with writers.”

However, recently, public controversy seems to be coming his way. In a September article about biographer Walter Isaacson in New York magazine, journalist Shawn McCrees quoted Lewis as saying that Isaacson was named an exemplary alumnus of their private school three times.

As quoted in the article, Isaacson seems to subtly suggest that Lewis loves to embellish – or, in his words, “loves to say pretty things” – which led McCrees to link this story with the controversy over Oher and concerns about Lewis, saying that Lewis’s narrative is “too…romanticized.”

Lewis told me that he plans to share the stage with Isaacson during his book tour in New Orleans to break this stereotypical influence.

Lewis said, “The first thing I want to talk about is the people at this New York magazine – the asshole who did this – and what actually happened.”

He is angry about the irony. “What it tells me is that the logic of the person writing this article is completely different from mine. They think that to get material of this level, they have to embellish.”

He had previously faced criticism from fellow journalists. In 1997, Marjorie Williams wrote a sharp critique of Lewis for Vanity Fair. In it, she interviewed his ex-girlfriend and expressed doubts about his “naive” image of telling the truth, questioning his journalistic ethics by highlighting the discrepancies between his book and the magazine articles it was adapted from.

“I think it’s kind of stupid,” Lewis said of Williams’ article. “But I can’t do anything about it, except spend the money Vanity Fair paid me when I became a writer.”

Ten years later (in 2007), Graydon Carter hired Lewis to write for the magazine, offering him a rate of $10 per word. (Williams passed away in 2005.)

Lewis said he couldn’t back down from a fight, which was one of the reasons he avoided posting on X (the predecessor to Twitter). “As a Southern man, it’s painful to not fight back or respond with insults.”

The last time we met at a luxury bar in the Greenwich Hotel (where he likes to stay when on business), I asked Lewis if he had ever considered slowing down. He replied, “Write less, you mean?” I said, “That’s like giving up your fastball.”

He laughed out loud and said, “Besides getting stronger, I don’t feel anything. I trust my words more than ever before.”

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