Q&A with Michael Lewis on his FTX book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon”, slated for October 3, visiting SBF, the forthcoming trial, and more
About a year after the author Michael Lewis began to shadow Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried was arrested.
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs back to November 2022, when reporting revealed that Michael Lewis had spent six months shadowing Bankman-Fried before the collapse — and that CAA was already pitching the then-unwritten book to Hollywood buyers. The same month, Bankman-Fried sat for Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit under a "nothing is off limits" promise, an early test of how the fallen founder would narrate himself publicly.
This Q&A lands just ahead of the October 3 publication, and it arrives into a crowded field of interpretations: Zeke Faux's Number Go Up excerpt already documented Lewis lavishing praise on Bankman-Fried at an April 2022 Bahamas conference, sharpening the question of how close the embed became. With the trial still ahead, Lewis's account will shape the public frame before prosecutors and defense lawyers do.
First-order effects
- Readers get Lewis's definitive characterization — Bankman-Fried as delusional but with explanations he finds "irritatingly difficult to disprove" — weeks before the trial begins, giving jurors' eventual verdicts a pre-existing narrative to confirm or contradict.
- The Times repositions itself from interviewer of Bankman-Fried (the DealBook Summit) to platform for his chronicler, extending its franchise on the story.
Second-order effects
- Hollywood interest that CAA seeded when the manuscript didn't yet exist now has source material, setting up an adaptation race among studios for rights to a book whose subject's legal outcome is still undetermined.
- Competing chroniclers like the Number Go Up author gain a foil: every sympathetic detail in Going Infinite invites comparison with the more adversarial outsider accounts already published.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major financial collapses will increasingly be framed first by embedded authors rather than by courtrooms — with publishers timing releases against trial calendars and access journalism's closeness to its subjects becoming part of the story itself.
The trend: Collapse-era business books are becoming pre-trial narrative battlegrounds, where an embedded author's sympathy toward the subject shapes public judgment before the legal system delivers its own verdict.