Going Infinite

Lewis met Bankman-Fried in 2021, introduced by Brad Katsuyama, head of the IEX stock exchange. Katsuyama was thinking of selling a stake of IEX to FTX. He asked Lewis to investigate Bankman-Fried. Lewis did so and came away impressed, believing that while Bankman-Fried was ambitious, he was not grandiose. The Guardian reported that when Bankman-Fried was arrested in late 2022, Lewis had been following him for most of a year on the grounds that there was a book in him, but had not yet decided what form it should take. Lewis was allowed to remain with Bankman-Fried even while controversy began to swirl. His purpose was to understand the man; he did not notice anything amiss with Bankman-Fried, and was caught off guard when FTX went bankrupt. Lewis told The Guardian writer Samanth Subramanian that he did not believe Bankman-Fried had ever lied to him or had ever set out to enrich himself, and that he had not attempted to condemn Bankman-Fried, as the mootness of his guilt meant it would not have served any narrative purpose. == Reception ==

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik called the book "a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism." Lewis, he asserts, "doesn't exercise any." He argues that a "torrent of nonsense" from Bankman-Fried in 2022 explaining FTX's losses "didn't snow many people who knew anything about finance and weren't angling for a piece of his action", but that "it sure seems to have snowed the hell out of Michael Lewis." Going Infinite appeared shortly after publication of the book by Zeke Faux about Bankman-Fried and crypto, Number Go Up, and received less favorable reviews than the Faux book. Lewis has engaged with criticism of the book, saying "Some people will be threatened by the truth", and that the "full story will do violence to their mental picture." Faux had reported in New York magazine that he saw Lewis "fawning" over Bankman-Fried during an onstage interview in 2022. In an interview with the New York Times, Lewis accused Faux of "trying to torpedo a rival book before it comes out", calling it "corrupt" and saying, "So who do I think is more skeevy, Sam or him? I'd have to think about that." ==Adaptation==

As Lewis was shadowing Bankman-Fried, before Lewis had even begun writing the book, Apple paid the author $5 million to acquire the screen rights for his eventual written account. == References ==