Michael Lewis

Michael Monroe Lewis was born October 15, 1960, in New Orleans, the son of a corporate lawyer, and grew up comfortably enough in the Garden District that Wall Street was not a plan so much as an accident. He graduated cum laude from Princeton in 1982 with a senior thesis on Donatello, not economics, then added a master's in economics from the London School of Economics in 1985 mostly to have somewhere to be. Salomon Brothers hired him as a bond salesman despite that thin qualification, first in New York and then in London, and put him inside the trading culture -- crude, high-stakes, absurdly overpaid -- that he then spent the next several decades explaining to people who had never been near it.

Lewis quit Salomon after three years and wrote up the experience as Liar's Poker in 1989, a memoir of Wall Street's mortgage-bond boom that became a bestseller and a business-school cautionary tale at once. He then built a career finding one overlooked expert inside a broken system and following that person's logic to its conclusion: Billy Beane's data-driven Oakland Athletics in Moneyball in 2003, the investors who saw the 2008 mortgage collapse coming in The Big Short in 2010, high-frequency traders rigging markets in milliseconds in Flash Boys in 2014, and the career federal bureaucrats the Trump transition ignored in The Fifth Risk in 2018. Four of his books became films; Moneyball and The Big Short both earned Best Picture Oscar nominations. In 2023 he published Going Infinite, a biography of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried.

Going Infinite cost Lewis some of the credibility his earlier books had built. Critics, including the New York Times, argued that his years of access to Bankman-Fried before the fraud conviction left him unable to see what was in front of him -- 'a front-row seat from which he could apparently see nothing,' as one review put it -- and that the book read as too sympathetic to a man a jury would convict on seven counts within months of publication. A larger cost predated the book: in May 2021 his daughter, nineteen-year-old Dixie, was killed with a friend when their car crossed a double-yellow line on a Northern California highway and struck an oncoming truck, for reasons investigators never determined. Lewis and his wife, journalist Tabitha Soren, have written and spoken about her since.

Lewis keeps working, still finding the one overlooked person inside a broken institution and building a book around their point of view; that method produced a three-decade run of bestsellers and Going Infinite's most serious criticism from the same instinct. Whether that book will eventually be read as the rare miss in an otherwise reliable body of work, or as proof that trusting a charismatic insider's own account has a real limit no earlier Lewis book hit, has not been settled by critics, by his own next book, or by him.

Michael Lewis's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Liar's Poker book
  Memoir of his years as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman 1989
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game book
  On Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics 2003
• The Big Short book
  On investors who foresaw the 2008 mortgage collapse 2010
• The Fifth Risk book
  On federal bureaucrats sidelined by the Trump transition 2018
• Going Infinite book
  Biography of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried 2023

• October 15, 1960 aged 0 Born in New Orleans, Louisiana
• 1982 aged ~22 Graduates Princeton cum laude in art history
• 1985 aged ~25 Joins Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman
• 1989 aged ~29 Publishes Liar's Poker
• October 1997 aged 36 Marries Tabitha Soren
• 2003 aged ~43 Publishes Moneyball
• 2010 aged ~50 Publishes The Big Short
• May 2021 aged 60 His daughter Dixie dies in a car accident in Northern California
• 2023 aged ~63 Publishes Going Infinite, on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX

• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. profiled in The Fifth Risk
• Brad Pitt b. 1963
  Actor and producer whose roles in Fight Club and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made him a global star. subject portrayed by
• Malcolm Gladwell b. 1963
  Staff writer for The New Yorker whose books on social science became publishing phenomena. contemporary of
• Tom Wolfe 1930–2018
  New Journalism pioneer whose The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities chronicled American culture. influenced by