Best-selling author with front-row seat to the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried has new book in the works

Abest-selling author will be turning his attention to a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who was the world’s youngest billionaire and at one point considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas before his spectacular downfall.

Michael Lewis, the author of “The Big Short” (which was turned into an Oscar-winning movie), will be coming out with his new book, “Going Infinite – The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon” about FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried this October.

According to the publishing company Penguin Books, “Going Infinite” will tell a “high-octane story of the enigmatic figure at the heart of one of the 21st century’s most spectacular financial collapses.”

Lewis is asking: “Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?”

Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment complex in Albany, New Providence, Bahamas, last December after criminal charges were filed against him the US. The 30-year-old was extradited to the US shortly after. He faces several fraud charges, including wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to commit fraud and violating campaign finance laws. Bankman-Fried could be sentenced to up to 115 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Author and financial journalist Michael Lewis unexpectedly got a first-row seat to Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall.

He told the UK Guardian he was originally asked by a friend of his to “make sense” of this young

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Lewis was then given unlimited access to Bankman-Fried after the two were introduced and went hiking together.

“At the end of the hike I turned to him and said: ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, I don’t know where your story is going, I’ve never seen anything like this.’ I just thought to myself I wanted to be a fly on the wall and he said yes. And to this day he’s never limited my access,” Lewis told the UK Guardian.

“When it all comes crashing down last November it’s literally me, his parents and his therapist. And I can hang around as long as I want, see whatever I want.”

Bankman-Fried is currently seeking a dismissal of criminal charges against him, saying prosecutors of the Manhattan federal court have improperly made federal crimes out of civil and regulatory issues that resulted from an industrywide collapse of cryptocurrency markets.

This week, he and other former FTX executives were being sued by FTX lawyers over the $220 million acquisition of stock-clearing platform Embed, alleging lack of due diligence.

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