Wait! I think Michael Lewis is right.

An author should be judged on whether they deliver on their promise. Contrary to what everyone else claims, Lewis did what he said he would.

I read Michael Lewis’s new book, Going Infinite, last week. I wasn’t necessarily planning to, as I’m not hugely invested in the Sam Bankman-Fried saga, and even though I admire Lewis I don’t read every one of his books. But I wanted to read this one because it was universally panned by the critical media. I dove into the book rubbing my hands together, eager to see what brought down this giant of journalism in the eyes of the critical public. And yet… I couldn’t help but come away feeling that Lewis got it right.

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Moneyball Author Swings and Misses; Big Short Author Comes Up Short; Blind Side Author Turns Blind Eye; Liar’s Poker Author Gets Bluffed; Undoing Project Author Leaves Latest Project Undone… you get the idea.

Michael Lewis is one of the most successful and widely admired journalists of his generation. Even if you haven’t read his books, you’ve probably watched the movies they’ve been turned into: The Blind Side, Moneyball, The Big Short. Every rock Lewis turns over seems to be hiding the undervalued narrative material of a best-seller in the making. His debut, Liar’s Poker, was recently released for its thirty-fifth anniversary, and in that three and a half decades Lewis has established himself as a master of his craft.

In his last two books, Lewis detailed the decimation of important but publicly unappreciated government employees during the Trump administration and the scientists who saw the pandemic coming. Both were well-received. And so it’s a bit of an eyebrow-raiser whenever Lewis’s newest offering is met with negative critical response—mostly because I’ve never actually seen that happen before. But it is exactly what has happened to his latest book on former crypto-billionaire, former soon-to-be-trillionaire, and current alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

Pretty much everyone who reviewed this book agreed on two things: (a) Lewis is generationally great at narrative journalism, but (b) this time he got it wrong. Jennifer Szalai, of the New York Times, called Lewis’s book “strange”—in her opening sentence. A number of reviews said that the book on crypto you really want to read is Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, including a compare-and-contrast in a very helpful Economist article, which notes that Lewis’s book “reveals little about the inner workings of crypto.” Even money people (as opposed to, like, literary people) really didn’t like it: Fortune declared that Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF but failed to reveal any new information. The original title of Helen Lewis’s piece for The Atlantic was “Michael Lewis is Buying What Sam Bankman-Fried is Selling.” Ouch.

All that is bad. But you know it’s really bad when Noah Smith weighs in without having even read the book. Usually the paragon of level-headed, evidence-based reasoning, Smith wrote the following of Lewis’s book:

I haven’t read Lewis’ SBF book yet, but in recent interviews, Lewis certainly says things about SBF that are less negative than anything else I’ve read. For example, talking to 60 Minutes, Lewis said that he doesn’t believe that SBF knowingly stole his customers’ money. And in a recent Time interview, he asserted that the money was lost due to SBF’s “catastrophic sloppiness” rather than to deliberate malfeasance. When asked if SBF is a serial liar, Lewis hedges, calling him a “serial withholder” instead.

… I don’t have enough information to say Lewis is wrong here, but I expect when all is said and done, there will be solid evidence that SBF knowingly stole from his customers.

Wow! I mean, what does Lewis say in this book to make people so mad? Is it some kind of love letter to Mr Bankman-Fried? Is the book an argument for SBF’s innocence? When I picked up this book, I was curious to read it so I could see for myself what about this book made it a near-universal target of ire. I came into it with a sincere eagerness to see how exactly the mighty have fallen.

But then I read it, and well… I didn’t agree with the critical backlash. I don’t think Lewis got the story wrong. He may not have told the story people wanted him to tell. But that’s not at all the same thing as getting it wrong. Lewis is very clear about the book’s mission at the beginning, and in my reading he achieves it. I don’t think he missed the bigger story. I don’t think he went easy on SBF. To claim otherwise seems like a pretty serious misreading of the book. Because this deviates from what so many others thought, I want to try to explain why.

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In Lewis’s telling, what is the SBF story actually about?

Let me say up front that in my personal theory of non-fiction criticism, a book should be judged mainly on whether it lives up to the promise made by the authors at the book’s outset. This is the fundamental compact between writer and reader. The writer makes a promise about the story that they are going to tell you. And if the value of what’s promised seems sufficiently high, you read the book. The title, subtitle, cover, and author’s brand recognition are part of this promise. And the introduction is part of this promise. It is possible for an author to miss what’s important about a story, absolutely—and it is your right as a reader to come to that conclusion. But the author’s core responsibility is to make a promise, then fulfill it. So what does Lewis promise?

At the outset of Going Infinite, Lewis poses a very specific question. In the final paragraph of the book’s introduction, Lewis presents the reader with the culmination of his first meeting with SBF. An investor friend had asked him to meet with Bankman-Fried to form his own impression, to figure out who this guy is and whether it would be wise to invest money with him. Lewis writes:

By the end of this walk [with Bankman-Fried], I was totally sold. I called my friend and said something like: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong? It was only later that I realized I hadn’t even begun to answer his original question: Who was this guy?

The part that most critics quote in their pieces was what Lewis said to his investor friend: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! But the important part, the part that sets up the promise of the book, is the last sentence. This is what the book is about. Lewis, like everyone else in the finance world, was taken in by Sam Bankman-Fried. But no one—not then, not even now—could answer this very basic question. Who was this guy? The story Lewis sets himself up to tell is one that attempts to answer this question.

In trying to understand Lewis’s aim, it’s helpful to look at his previous books. I remember many years ago reading an interview by Malcolm Gladwell where Gladwell claimed, essentially, that his own style wasn’t all that unique because he was essentially doing what Michael Lewis does but across ten stories in a book instead of one. (I can’t find that interview now, but in looking for it I did come across a piece in WSJ magazine, called A Unified Theory of Michael Lewis, which makes all the relevant assertions.) I remember having read this because I thought it was totally off. The whole point of Gladwell’s approach of stitching stories together is to pull out their underlying dynamics—making a specific claim about the generalizable principle which the story embodies in concrete form. Lewis by contrast doesn’t offer this kind of critical insight. He never has.

For example, when he wrote Liar’s Poker, his goal, which he explains in an interview with Tim Ferris circa 2020, was to write what he saw happening in his first-hand experience as a trader in the 1980s as clearly and directly as possible. As Lewis says:

I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it, because I really just thought, my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were Education Of Henry Adams and Rousseau’s Confessions. The model was: just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it and that’s enough. You don’t need to layer on an interpretation of what happened. What happens is good enough.

Nonetheless, readers wrote in to say: Dear Mr Lewis, thank you for writing a book on how to get rich on Wall Street. Are there any other tips that you did not include in the book? Michael Lewis has always treaded that line between buying into the story he’s telling and trying to give you the unvarnished facts of what he’s seen. For as long as there have been Michael Lewis books, there have been misreadings of Michael Lewis books.

This is what you are getting when you buy a book with the name Michael Lewis on the front. This is what Lewis promises to do. Present the facts as he sees them. To let the reader draw their own conclusion. This has always been his formula: fall in love with a character, gain privileged access to their perspective, and present the reader with the facts of what this character is seeing that the rest of us aren’t.

That said, I admit it’s totally the case that the way you tell a story reveals how you think about it. Several reviewers have noted Lewis’s M.O. is to fall in love with his characters. In Going Infinite, this was the first time that he fell in love with a character, started in on the story, and then mid-reporting the character turned into a villain in the eyes of the public. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose (as Helen Lewis does in her Atlantic piece) that Lewis was unable to take the rosy glasses off when new information came to light.

In this reading, Lewis’s latest book is a kind of Kahneman & Tversky-style cognitive bias experiment. In the classic work, detailed both in Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Lewis’s story of their collaboration, The Undoing Project, our heuristic-based cognitive biases—such as confirmation bias, anchoring and adjustment, etc—work well 95% but in clever experimental setups can be shown to be wildly incorrect. Maybe the circumstances of the SBF story contrived to reveal the shortcomings of Lewis’s which have up until now remained invisible. This time around the situation was arranged to pull the curtain back on just how poorly this strategy can play out—specifically when you’re used to writing about unsung heroes and then end up writing about well-known crooks.

But I don’t buy it. I think yes, Michael Lewis is still enamored of his subject. But not overly so. In my reading what other people are mistaking for admiration is that, in short, Lewis finds the story amusing. It is not a story about who is right and who is wrong. It is just kind of nuts—and Lewis found it fun to watch it all go down. One of the first set piece scenes of the book is when SBF is on a Zoom call with Anna Wintour, and Bankman-Fried is playing video games counting the seconds until the call is over. It is a unique moment in human history. Lewis was there to document it.

It is not until the last chapter that he really gives the reader any insight into his own verdict on the matter. If you read all but that final chapter, you’d probably be a bit confused why everyone is so up in arms about it. And it is these conclusions which he talks about disproportionately in interviews (and then quoted by Noah Smith et al) because, well, that’s what people want to know. So Mr Lewis… do you think he’s guilty? Frankly, I’m surprised at how desperate people are for Lewis to come to a very simple, straightforward answer that yes, SBF is unequivocally guilty of knowingly defrauding his investors.

Ultimately, the question “Who was this guy” has two functions in the story. The first has to do with giving an answer; the second has to do with a kind of non-answer. Lewis’s investigative reporting is meant to give his best answer possible, and that’s the content of the story. But part of the conclusion, Lewis’s own take on what he’s uncovered, is that he isn’t really able to give a simple answer. It’s not just “He’s a crook” or “He’s unbelievably naive.” In Lewis’s reading, any who tries to give a straightforward answer like that misses some important part of the SBF account. And anyone who actually seems to know him—that is, who has spent some large amount of time working closely with him—has no idea, even still, who he is. That’s the whole point! When you look at all the facts, it’s really hard to tell who this guy is, what motivates him, why he’s done what he’s done, or even what he did.

Lewis at no point promises to reveal whether or not SBF is guilty. He doesn’t promise to tell you everything you want to know about cryptocurrency or Effective Altruism. He doesn’t promise to tell you whether investors were knowingly defrauded. He simply doesn’t. And if your criticism of him is that he doesn’t reveal enough on this topic—which seems to be the main criticism leveled against him—then you have a right to feel that way. But it’s not the author’s responsibility to write the book you want them to. Doing otherwise is like going to your local Persian restaurant and criticizing them for not serving Korean food. If you want Korean food, pick a different restaurant! It is the author’s responsibility to give you a sense of what the book is trying to do and do it to the best of their ability. This is the final critical measure of whether a book succeeds. On this metric, Lewis hits the mark.

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What specifically does Lewis claim about SBF’s guilt/innocence?

So let’s talk about that final chapter. As it stands, I find Lewis’s argument in it compelling. I’m not an expert on the SBF story (though I did follow it prior to Lewis’s book) or crypto as a field. I’m evaluating the argument Lewis makes at face value.

First of all, the question that everyone is taking Lewis to task on is a psychological one. It is about intent. It is about getting into Bankman-Fried’s head and deciphering his past beliefs and goals. It is not about whether investors were defrauded; they definitely were. It is about whether they were knowingly defrauded. Does the evidence, as presented by Lewis, point to witting malfeasance or unwitting incompetence?

Here’s my summary of the specific claims Lewis actually makes: His overall conclusion to the story is that he’s a smart kid who is misunderstood by pretty much everyone, not unlike Michael Burry in The Big Short, or Billy Beane in Moneyball. But unlike those characters, Bankman-Fried gets in over his head in a way that flips the script. Instead of continuing to be misunderstood, people start to believe in him. They buy into this ineffable quality he has which is something like mystique. Lewis’s story is structured to show that SBF’s well-documented incompetence at the larger scale (misplacing billions worth of investor’s money) is more or less identical to the incompetence that he exhibited at the smaller scale (which is what the first third or so of the book is about, particularly misplacing millions of his own money). When things were going well for SBF and his companies, people said he was going to be the first trillionaire. And then it all goes wrong, and everyone is just as quick to believe that he was the world’s greatest schmuck. In Lewis’s view, these opposing beliefs were based largely on intuition rather than evidence but nonetheless maintained with equal fervor by public consensus.

As far as I can tell, people who are mad about Lewis’s conclusions are either overextending his claims into something stronger than he actually says or feel that he has cherry-picked all of the evidence leading up to this conclusion. It seems like the first one is pretty well explained by people not reading the book with enough nuance and being quick to anger when the story doesn’t share their own prejudices. However, the second one is definitely a plausible issue, and I would very much be willing to update my position based on additional evidence.

Yet in rebuttal to this second concern—that told the cherry-picked story in a way that made SBF look good—my main problem with that concern is that Lewis didn’t do that. The story isn’t meant to get us to fall in love with SBF or believe him or think he’s a good guy. It’s hardly a flattering portrait at all. Lewis isn’t exactly making fun of Bankman-Fried, but more making fun of people who were taken in by himself (including the author himself): Look! This is the guy you thought was going to be the world’s first trillionaire! In reviews, people write as if Lewis himself thinks Bankman-Fried was truly destined to save the world then it was society who unfairly decided to throw him under the bus. Not at all! Lewis may need to fall in love with his subjects to write his books. But the reader doesn’t need to fall in love with them to read ‘em.

Anyway, there are also a lot of specific claims Lewis makes which I think are strong. For the most part, I see people disagreeing with the general points of his conclusion because it doesn’t fit with the story they want to tell about the obviousness of SBF’s guilt. But I don’t see a lot of evidence to combat the specific holes in the “witting malfeasance” story Lewis points out. Here are the specific claims Lewis makes supporting why is skeptical that SBF knowingly defrauded investors:

• If he wanted to knowingly defraud, he could have done it better. He could have covered his tracks. Lewis goes into the details, but in short it would have been very easy for him to make slightly less money but dramatically decrease the likelihood of getting caught. SBF was all about calculating “expected value” and was particularly sensitive to Black Swan events that are low probability but catastrophic. So if he was actually trying to defraud, he would’ve done a lot better job of it.

• There were lots of people who should have noticed that something was amiss (i.e., had the incentive to identify the issues and should have had access to the relevant knowledge, if that knowledge was in fact available). This is true both internally for the company and for its outside investors. For the internal team, the question is why pretty much all of the insiders acted in a way that went against their best interests. Lewis writes:

None of the characters in this financial drama had behaved as financial characters are expected to behave. Gary had owned a piece of Alameda Research, but his stake in FTX was far more valuable. Nishad owned a big chunk of FTX and none of Alameda Research. Ditto Caroline, who ran Alameda Research but owned shares only in FTX. None of these people had any interest in moving money out of FTX into Alameda Research [which is the main thing at issue in the fraud allegation] in a way that put FTX in jeopardy. Just the reverse: it might as well have been their money that was being moved. And yet at least up until late spring of 2022, when crypto prices began to plunge, and possibly much later than that, none of them expressed disapproval of the risk being taken with their fortunes. Why not?

• Lewis’s interpretation also leans on a version of Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” In Lewis’s reading of events, incompetence is the simplest explanation. The reason he doesn’t present any interpretation or call into question other people’s readings of the facts is that he’s showing you all the little things at which Bankman-Fried was incompetent are pretty much the same as the big thing of which he is being accused of malicious intent. Lewis provides evidence that all the little stuff was due to incompetence, albeit incompetence on an epic scale. In the absence of direct evidence, it’s difficult to leverage the evidence in the little stuff into supporting a totally different psychological interpretation of the big stuff.

• Lewis is also skeptical of the prosecutor appointed to the case. According to Lewis, the prosecutor doesn’t know anything about crypto. A lot of things that look like classical fraud in the pre-crypto paradigm are perfectly explicable by common knowledge facts in the crypto world. Lewis isn’t saying evidence of knowing fraud will never be revealed. He is saying that a lot of the assumptions that we (the public, the prosecutor, etc) are used to making need to be reexamined.

• What best explains the public certainty that SBF is guilty is the same thing that explained the public certainty that he would one day be a trillionaire. People just don’t know what they’re talking about and are speculating with an undue degree of confidence. Lewis’s argument, in short, is that if we seriously ask the question “Who was this guy?” the answer is that we still don’t really know.

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Same level of niceness + same level of criticality + different evidence = different conclusion

Here’s a quote from Noah Smith that gets to the heart of why I’m defending Lewis against the criticism his book has received:

So my bet is that Michael Lewis is just being way way too nice to SBF here. But why? Lewis didn’t hold back when criticizing the bond traders at Salomon Bros. or the creators of mortgage-backed CDOs; why would he lob such a softball at a guy whose finance empire was infinitely more scammy than those others?

I think there’s a simple answer to why. It is this: Same level of niceness + same level of criticality + different evidence = different conclusion. Michael Lewis is just as nice as he always was. Michael Lewis is just as critical as he always was. Michael Lewis may fall in love with his characters, but that doesn’t mean he has no critical distance. If he was really just a run-of-the-mill finance bro, he would’ve just stayed on Wall Street instead of becoming a writer. The reason that he told the story the way he did is not because he changed. It is because the facts changed.

In summary, what Lewis set his book up to do was tell the backstory about who SBF was and why that question was so hard to answer—even now and even when asking those closest to him. Lewis’s general claim is that SBF’s psychology is difficult to decipher and that makes the psychological question of intent difficult to answer. His specific claims succeed in creating uncertainty about people’s belief that SBF is guilty of knowingly defrauding investors. In his own defense, Lewis said:

Lord knows the very easy, lazy thing to do right now would be to throw Sam under every bus you could, and try to make him seem as bad as possible, because people respond to that. But it just wouldn’t be true. It’s not the character I knew. It’s not the situation I knew…There’s a long history of people getting in trouble for books that are right, and the books end up being extremely valuable...And in this case, again, it felt like there’s a tribe waiting that were natively hostile to the truth of the story I experienced.

From the evidence and arguments I’ve seen, I buy what Lewis is selling. No one else has convinced me otherwise, even though I came in wanting to agree with them. Most articles have said something along the lines of SBF is clearly guilty but Lewis doesn’t say so, therefore Lewis has screwed something up in his story. Whether SBF is guilty, I don’t know. I’m not an expert on financial crime, and frankly what will become of this young man is not a concern that keeps me up at night. I’d very much be willing to flip the position I’ve described here based on additional evidence, and I look forward to reading the other crypto book by Zeke Faux to see if that gives an insight into something Lewis overlooked.

But I do think that we need to judge books, if not by their cover, then by the fulfillment of promises made in their introduction. Michael Lewis kept his promises. He’s still got it.