60 Minutes Interview of Michael Lewis Contains Two Doozies

In the US, books are always published on Tuesdays, and around my house, the Tuesday of a new Michael Lewis book brings heated anticipation. And not just cuz we own a bookstore. Liar’s Poker, Money Ball, The Big Short, Flash Boys and Next are all key books in our household. And even the misses — The Blind Side and Trail Fever come to mind — offer a few insights and some great turns of Crawfish phrase.

So a book by a gifted storyteller about crypto’s most impossible to ignore character is naturally of great interest to Modern Consensus. But Lewis’ appearance last night on 60 Minutes to promote his book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon contained at least two shocking revelations that merit special mention.

Here are the revelations that are not the two most shocking.

It’s not that SBF didn’t know who Anna Wintour is. 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim was shocked in asking Lewis, “What does Anna Wintour want with a schlub like Sam?” but the number of people who don’t know who Anna Wintour is might surprise both host and interviewer.

And it’s not that he paid Tom Brady $55 million for 20 hours a year for 3 years; Stephen Curry $35 million for same; $100 million-plus to rename the Miami Heat’s arena; $25 million to make a Super Bowl ad and then paid another $10 million for Larry David to star in it. There’s a glibness to Lewis’ presentation of these numbers that is so off-putting. The focus is entirely on Sam and zero on the pain that thousands of money losers experienced. “Oh my gosh! The quarterback genuinely liked the Asperger’s kid with the wild hair! Isn’t that just darling!!!” It’s grotesque. Businesses have marketing expenses. Businesses that go broke would of course like to have back whatever they spent when things were good. But the craziness of these expenditures, when it seems as though zero real business scrutiny was deployed–Lewis says FTX had no HR dept, no compliance dept, and SBF didn’t know the names of anyone on its board of directors— is very painful to hear.

And as crazy as it sounds, the two most shocking revelations did not include the stunner that SBF conceived a plan to pay Donald Trump not to run for president in 2024, and supposedly “got a price” of $5 billion for that endeavor. There’s no confirmation that the number came from anyone anywhere near Trump. And even SBF, who we know was not exactly punctilious about following rules, is said by Lewis to have fretted that a $5 billion payout might not be legal.

No, here are the two most shocking moments of Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with Michael Lewis.

The first came at the 11 min mark. Lewis tells the story of a 2022 meeting that took place between Sam Bankman-Fried and Mitch McConnell. Lewis sees SBF on his way to the airport with a balled-up blue suit, a shoe falling out of the pile; no shirt, no belt. He paints a memorable image. Bankman-Fried “wanted to help McConnell fund Republican candidates at odds with Donald Trump.”

“The subtext of this dinner is that Sam is going to write tens of millions of dollars of checks to a SuperPAC that McConnell is then going to use to get elected people who are not hostile to Democracy… He and his people had done the work to distinguish between actual deep Trumpers and people who were just seeming to approve of Donald Trump but were actually willing to govern.”

Neither Wertheim nor Lewis seems to grasp the damage this is going to do the Minority Leader. That McConnell is seeking funds from the 7^th largest donor of the 2022 cycle — and 99.5% of those donations went to Democrats— to thwart the de facto leader of the Republican Party and its likely presidential nominee is not going to sit well with a base already deeply distrustful of McConnell.

Then the next shocking bit comes from Lewis himself.

At 21:08, Wertheim asks Lewis point blank how he could not have known that $8 billion in FTX funds had landed in Alameda’s accounts.

According to Lewis, SBF told him, “You have to understand that when it was in there, it was a rounding error. I felt like we had infinity dollars in there, and I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

Wertheim does that journalism trick of saying “but some might say…” and he gets off a good line.

“I can see people watching this saying, ‘C’mon guys, this is Elizabeth Holmes in cargo shorts.’ And this is all a ruse, don’t fall for the schtick, this is a bad actor.”

Lewis, in perhaps his most tone-deaf moment since his column for the New Republic about how hot his wife is, replies with a stunning lack of awareness of the lives undone by the disappearance of FTX funds.

“It is a little different,” Lewis says, defensively, “supplying phony medical information to people that might kill them. In this case, what you’re doing is possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas.”

SBF’s life will be rescued if a single juror dismisses the thousands of individuals who lost money as “crypto speculators in the Bahamas.” That might be his best hope. But it’s a long shot.