'Look when nobody's looking': How author Michael Lewis uncovers hidden stories

On the heels of Going Infinite, his new book about beleaguered crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, Michael Lewis talks with the BBC about storytelling, money and his singular approach to grief.

Michael Lewis looks into a bookstore, flush with his works. He says it "doesn't matter where the character is" – you follow the story. He has indeed been on a journey through his prolific non-fiction catalogue, narratives that have taken him to Wall Street and back again, Silicon Valley and even baseball stadiums and American football fields across the US. 

The best-selling author and long-time Vanity Fair contributor s BBC correspondent Katty Kay on her series Influential for a candid conversation about his multi-decade storytelling career, plus his own major storyline: the tragic loss of his daughter, which left him grieving in unconventional ways.

Throughout the past three decades, Lewis, 64, has often found himself in the centre of important – sometimes controversial – conversations, with more than a dozen books that trace the intersection of business and culture. His charge: distilling complicated subjects to a wide audience, with a character-driven approach that turns oft-opaque issues into human-centric, thrilling stories.

He began with Liar's Poker in 1989, which pulled back the curtain on his hustle in the rocky, heady world of 1980s finance at high-profile investment firm Salomon Brothers. Many of his titles have rocketed to best-seller lists, including Moneyball, which unpacks the statistics-driven strategy to build a championship baseball team on a shoestring; and The Big Short, the tale of 2008's subprime mortgage crisis, told through dark, even haunting humour. (Both books ended up as blockbuster films.)

Kay points out Lewis often takes on "quite dense, quite nerdy" subject matter. He sees it somewhat less starkly. "I've gotten particularly interested in something and seen something about it that isn't obvious to the world in some way," he says.

Going straight for the details has always been his nature. Before becoming a writer, Lewis apprenticed as a cabinet maker, studied art history at Princeton University, worked at a prominent art dealership and guided wealthy American teenagers through Europe. As much as he loved the art world, he decided it wasn't sustainable, and pivoted to Wall Street – the experience he recounts in Liar's Poker.

In the back of his mind, however, he always knew he wanted to write. "It just starts with the character and a situation," says Lewis of his approach to finding stories. 

For his latest book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, he found the perfect personality in Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency magnate who shot to prominence by founding crypto exchange FTX. "[Bankman-Fried was] a socially maladjusted human being, who most of human history would have found no particular use for," he says. "[He] went from being worth nothing to being worth 22-and-a-half billion dollars in 18 months, and then starts to change the world in all kinds of weird ways."

The author's timing could not have been more apt; on the day Going Infinite hit stores, Bankman-Fried went on trial for seven counts of fraud and money laundering, for which he was convicted in November 2023. The book yet again vaulted Lewis to the top of conversation in the business world; mixed in with glowing reviews were criticisms from voices in the crypto space, who say Lewis put a biased, positive spin on Bankman-Fried. Going Infinite "may be regarded as either the pinnacle or the nadir of his career", wrote Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker.

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