The problem with Lewis's book is that it was pretty clear it was an on-a-dime pivot from the original story he had planned to tell, about a wunderkind revolutionizing finance and trying to save the world at the same time.
And Lewis was into the original plot less than this one. Lewis is clearly on board with the progressive inclination to say that their cause is more important than operating within traditional bounds on behavior. Lewis was on board with SBF's irresponsible approach to risk management and regulatory oversight, because unlike Wall Streeters taking excessive risk for personal gain, SBF doing it for the sake of "improving humanity" was just breaking an egg to make an omelette.
Yup, I'm really surprised by people defending Lewis. Don't get me wrong, I own most of his books but his 60 minutes interview about SBF was a cringe fest.
Yeah, I think those people just didn’t watch Lewis’ interviews on SBF.
Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things).
I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially.
[0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.
You're like reading my mind. Flash Boys made me question everything he ever wrote. I happen to know a great deal about HFT, and Lewis was like a proto-GPT, espousing with great confidence things that were easily verifiably false. It made me wonder if all his books were just as ill-informed and my ignorance of the subject kept me from realizing it.
There's more of us it seems! I've been in HFT for the past 15 years and after reading Flash Boys I had to do a full 180 on Lewis. Every single book from him I now treat as mainly fiction sprinkled with some historical facts to maybe make it more relatable.
I don't even think it requires knowledge of HFT to see the flaw in the whole thing.
For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."
Even if FTX had never collapsed, I would still be shocked that Lewis didn't get proof of the management team's charitable donations. Through the whole book, Lewis keeps saying that all the profits were getting rolled into charity. Then in the trial, it came Singh testified that he hadn't actually been giving away money; it is unclear if other folks were doing the same thing.
