Michael Lewis

Lewis was born in New Orleans, the son of corporate attorney J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis.[5] He went to Isidore Newman School. He later attended Princeton University and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in art and archaeology in 1982 after completing a 166-page senior thesis titled "Donatello and the Antique."[6] At Princeton, Lewis was a member of the Ivy Club.[1] He briefly worked with New York City art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Lewis said that his initial ambition was to become an art historian, but he was quickly dissuaded once he realized that there would be no jobs available for art historians and that even the handful that existed did not pay well.[7]

Lewis subsequently enrolled at the London School of Economics and received an MA in economics in 1985.[8][9] He was hired by Salomon Brothers, stayed for a while in New York for its training program, and then relocated to London, where he worked at its London office as a bond salesman for a few years.[10] He has said that the journalism from this era found in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal inspired him to explore becoming a writer.[11]

In a review of Moneyball, Dan Ackman of Forbes said that Lewis had a special talent: "He can walk into an area already mined by hundreds of writers and find gems there all along but somehow missed by his predecessors".[33] A New York Times piece said that "no one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis", praising his ability to use his subject's stories to show the problems with the systems around them.[34]

Critics from outside the financial industry have criticized Lewis for what they consider inaccuracies in his writing. In a 2011 column in The Atlantic, American journalist and sports author Allen Barra took issue with Lewis's characterization of Major League Baseball in Moneyball, writing, "From a historical standpoint, Lewis is, well, way off base. By the end of the 20th century baseball had achieved a greater level of competitive balance than at any time in the game's history... Moneyball doesn't just get the state of present-day baseball wrong; it also misrepresents the history of the sport."[35]

Lewis's Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt ignited a new round of controversy surrounding high-frequency trading. At a House Financial Services Committee hearing in April 2014, Mary Jo White, a former Wall Street insider (as a Debevoise & Plimpton litigations lawyer primarily for Wall Street financial firms)[36] who later served as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair, denied the book's premise, saying, "The markets are not rigged".[37] In June 2014, White announced that the SEC would undergo a new round of regulatory review in response to concerns about dark pools and market structure.[38]

Book critics widely praised Lewis's The Undoing Project,[39] with Glenn C. Altschuler writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that it "may well be his best book".[40]

His 2023 book Going Infinite, an intimate account of Sam Bankman-Fried and his firm FTX, was written while FTX was collapsing and published the day Bankman-Fried's trial on charges of fraud and money laundering began. Lewis was criticized for giving Bankman-Fried's explanations for FTX's losses excessive deference, with journalist Michael Hiltzik calling the Bankman-Fried hype a "torrent of nonsense". The New York Times wrote of Lewis's extensive access to Bankman-Fried that he had "a front-row seat—from which he could apparently see nothing."[41][42][43] Others praised Lewis's storytelling, with The New Yorker calling the book "stupefyingly pleasurable" to read and filling "many gaps" in the story, ultimately predicting that the book "may one day be regarded as either the pinnacle or the nadir of his career".[44]

Lewis has been married three times. He married his first wife, Diane de Cordova Lewis, in 1985.[1] His second marriage was to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner; they got engaged three weeks after their first date.[45][46][47] In October 1997, he married former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren. She gave birth to his three children, daughters Quinn and Dixie, followed by son Walker.[48][49] In 2021, their middle child, daughter Dixie, was a passenger in a head-on collision with a semi truck near Truckee, California; the driver, her boyfriend, had inexplicably crossed the median. Both Dixie and her boyfriend were pronounced dead at the scene.[50]

Lewis and Soren reside in a wealthy portion of the Oakland Hills above Berkeley, California.[51][52]

Lewis is an atheist.[53]

• 2008 Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Magazines for "In Nature's Casino"[54]
• 2009 Gerald Loeb Award for Feature Writing for "The End"[55]
• 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for Feature Writing for "Wall Street on the Tundra"[56]

• Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1989. ISBN 0-393-02750-3.
• Pacific Rift. Knoxville, Tennessee: Whittle Direct Books. 1991. ISBN 0-9624745-6-8.
• The Money Culture. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1991. ISBN 0-393-03037-7.
• Trail Fever. New York: A. A. Knopf. 1997. ISBN 0-679-44660-5.
• The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1999. ISBN 0-393-04813-6.
• Next: The Future Just Happened. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. ISBN 0-393-02037-1.
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2003. ISBN 0-393-05765-8.
• Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2005. ISBN 0-393-06091-8.
• The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2006. ISBN 0-393-06123-X.
• Lewis, Michael, ed. (2008). The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics. New York: Sterling. ISBN 978-1-4027-4790-8.
• Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2009. ISBN 978-0-393-06901-3.
• Lewis, Michael, ed. (2009). Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06514-5.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2010. ISBN 978-0-393-07223-5.
• Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-08181-7.
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-24466-3.
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2017. ISBN 978-0-393-25459-4.
• The Coming Storm (Audiobook ed.). Audible Studios. 2018.
• The Fifth Risk. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2018. ISBN 978-1-324-00264-2.
• Playing To Win. New York: Audible. 2020. ASIN B08DL7ZJDX.
• The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2021. ISBN 978-0393881554.
• Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2023. ISBN 978-1-324-07433-5.

• 2020 United States Census, issues addressed in The Fifth Risk

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