The Author of "The Big Short" Needs to Protect Us from the Author of "Going Infinite"
What the coverage of Michael Lewis's new book tells us
A number of observations about the past week’s coverage of Michael Lewis’s shrewdly timed launch of Going Infinite, his book about the rise and fall of FTX that was either helped or hobbled by his access to its founder-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. (Opinions differ.)
You Make Your Own Luck
I’d like to start on a charitable note. Many have gushed about how “lucky” Lewis was that he just happened to be tagging along with SBF — perhaps intending to write a slightly different book — when the fit hit the shan. To this I say, “bullshit.” Luck had little to do with it. Lewis’s history and gift for financial storytelling opens up those doors and that level of access is his reward; what he does with that reward is an entirely separate matter. In my own trade, I bristle when people tell me how “lucky” I am to, say, score an earned media placement, a prestigious conference panel, or a well-negotiated sponsorship deal. I do not hold myself up as the “Michael Lewis” of my trade by any stretch but, after nearly three decades of doing this, I figure I’ve developed some instincts along the way.
The Media Circles Its Wagons
A former client of mine back in the late ‘90s used to have a “Mike Wallace” plan: If 60 Minutes came a-knocking, here were the responses to be given to the producers and this was the level of access to be granted. Full stop.
Fast forward to last week, and 60 Minutes’s Jon Wertheim let Lewis get away with the coda “[FTX] actually had a great, real business. If no one had ever cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customer deposits, they’d still be sitting there making tons of money.” Frankly, Wertheim displayed a level of credulity that rivaled Lesley Stahl’s unbearably saccharine profile of Mark Zuckerberg in 2008.
Put another way, Lewis feels that the real problem was that people were saying bad things that inspired others to take their money elsewhere, and not the evidence that inspired the loss of confidence in the first place. Yup. Totally indistinguishable from a successful mom-and-pop buffet shutting down because a local competitor circulated a fake picture of a cockroach in the mashed potatoes.
But it doesn’t stop there. The New Yorker tries its hardest to make Lewis’s fondness for his subject sound like a brilliant author’s 3-D chess — his own “big, contrarian bet” of the kind that anchors so much of his storytelling. The Guardian managed to occasionally bare its teeth, but in the barely related controversy around the film adaptation of Lewis’s book The Blind Side. The Washington Post gamely coughed up the obligatory excerpt, while ensuring that the review is peppered with enough incurious drive-bys about how awful crypto is. The Los Angeles Times focused its lament on Lewis’s uncharacteristic failures to handle explanatory material. The New York Times figured that Lewis was just out of his depth. (“He knows how to write a happy story, not a tragic one.”)
One gets the sense of a group that is protecting its own by pulling its punches or deftly head-faking. But I also suspect there are other factors at play here. Call it the “Apple Effect.”
The Apple Effect
It’s a reality in tech media circles: A bad review of the latest Apple product risks placement on a PR blacklist. This means no invites to future launch events and no room on any pre-briefing schedules for any scribe who offends Cupertino.
The company operates from a position of power, here. Apple launches are guaranteed to drive eager traffic to the sites with the best, timeliest, and most complete coverage. This is only possible with privileged access. No media outlet can afford to be left out of that news cycle, encouraging traffic to go elsewhere.
Does anyone in the national media want to be left out of the press cycle for the next book that will get everyone talking and previews the next must-see film? I have to imagine that the publishers of Going Infinite acutely understand what they have in the Michael Lewis franchise. Even if Going Infinite turns out to be Lewis’s “Newton,” there’s a better-than-even chance that his “iPhone” is on the way. Call it “praising through faint damns.”
FTX Coverage Remains an Ongoing Victory for Trade Journalism
While crypto media is often dismissed as merely cheerleading the industry it covers, it was crypto media, starting with CoinDesk, that exposed the problems at FTX, all while national media — and, it would seem, Michael Lewis — appeared more focused on maintaining its access to SBF.
A year later, the best evaluation of Michael Lewis’s approach to SBF continues to come from the crypto-journalism field. I leave you with some representative reads:
David Morris — “Lewis broadly characterizes the leakage of $8 billion dollars from FTX to Alameda Research (via the infamous “poorly labeled internal account”) as merely an oversight by a doofus. This is obviously a tempting frame – but it doesn’t withstand scrutiny, and it badly muddies the waters.”
Molly Jane Zuckerman, Blockworks — “Going Infinite was intended to be a success story. Unfortunately, when its main character turned into a failure overnight, so did the book.”
Cas Piancey, Protos — “I wish I could sit down with Lewis and the defense team and explain Hanlon’s Razor to them, that a broad, world-sized conspiracy is less believable than the collective stupidity of the FTX leadership, that Bankman-Fried being a greedy liar is more conceivable than him telling the truth and taking responsibility, and that losing all that money really did happen, really was Bankman-Fried’s fault, and really hurt hundreds of thousands of customers.”
Recommendations
“How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack,” Ben Wittes — I finish this newsletter while news of the horrific attack on Israel streams into all of my inputs. Early in this moment, Wittes writes with clarity and precision: “I am much more interested in conveying information than I am in telling people what I think—when I even know what I think, which is increasingly infrequent. One thing I do know what I think about is murder. I’m against it.”
“Work from Home Works,” Marginal Revolution — I’m fortunate to work for a remote-native/remote-always company. Incredibly, many companies are laser-focused on “Return To Office” (RTO) or, offensively, “Return To Work” (RTW). You all know my feelings about this, which I Tom Swifted last year. Now, here comes the science.
Bottom Story
I readily admit that I sometimes enjoy mashups more than I do their original components. Here are two of my favorites from the excellent YouTube channel of Bill McClintock.