The question that Michael Lewis has not answered re: FTX and Alameda is: At what point did he know it was a multi-billion dollar scam?
Did he know while he, Caroline and Bankman-Fried were hanging out, but decided to turn a blind eye to the fraud for the sake of his book and the inevitable movie?
Or did he find out what was going on literally under his nose (if some of the drug stories are to be believed) only along with everyone else in November 2022, which rather diminishes his street cred as a financial insider? Talk about having to thread the needle in your narrative.
Still a good wordsmith though.
From The Point Magazine, April 12, 2023:
After Sam Bankman-Fried’s epic fall from grace last year, news started circulating that he had been shadowed by Michael Lewis, the writer famous for his exposés of financial greed and impunity like Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, for several months prior to the FTX crash. In the weeks after his indictment, Lewis was reported to have visited Bankman-Fried while under house arrest in Palo Alto to continue gathering material for a book, sure to be a best-seller, on the rise and fall of the crypto boy-king. But what’s striking is, aside from Lewis, how few serious journalists gave his business practices a passing glance before they blew up in spectacular fashion. Despite the many gushing profiles that appeared in the years before the FTX crash, not a single reporter had bothered to look closely into his too-good-to-be-true scam—an oversight that might be more than a coincidence. The former billionaire and doyen of the “effective altruism” movement, it turned out, had been quietly funneling millions of dollars through his family foundation to journalism outlets like ProPublica, the Intercept, Semafor and Vox. In 2022 ProPublica had been awarded five million dollars for its work on “biothreats” and pandemic preparedness (it had only received a third of the money). Vox, for its part, had bagged $200,000 for a change-the-world section called Future Perfect that was, according to its initial explainer, “deeply inspired” by effective altruism. Amid the mea culpas and half-hearted apologies which followed Bankman-Fried’s arrest, most offered to put their grants on hold, and some have announced their intent to send the money back.
Chancers and nonprofit entrepreneurs like Bankman-Fried are only the tip of a very expensive iceberg. A cool quarter of a billion dollars, according to a study published in Columbia Journalism Review, flowed from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into journalism-related activities in the first half of 2020 alone. Recipients included everyone from the New York Times to NBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera and the Guardian. (Reporting for the CJR study, in turn, was paid for by another foundation, the Alicia Patterson Foundation.)
Meanwhile, the numbers of employed journalists continue to fall precipitously almost everywhere in the Western world, leaving many areas without a local paper at all. Newsroom employment in the United States, according to Pew Research Center, dropped 23 percent between 2008 and 2019—and at newspapers specifically, it dropped by a full 51 percent. In the news industry, almost all the conversation still turns on how to make ends meet: how to make up for the shortfall in classified advertising and cut costs, often by sacking journalists. Lost in all this is a much more troublesome and uncomfortable question: Who picks up the tab of paying for journalism when the audience won’t, and how does that change the truths that we journalists want to tell?
One emerging answer to the first question is big philanthropy. The equation behind this arrangement is simple. Even as journalism has become a good deal poorer in the last few decades, nongovernmental organizations and foundations have become vastly richer and more numerous. In an era of shrinking budgets, the collapse of newsroom expertise and the hollowing out of local news journalism, activist NGOs and foundations of all kinds have more resources to do research and to fund other people doing it. Many of them are now picking up the slack of doing serious investigative reporting. Welcome to the era of the “nonprofit newsroom.”
According to data from Media Impact Funders, newsrooms around the world raised a record $619.5 million from donors in 2020. In the U.K., where philanthropic giving has traditionally been meagre compared to the United States, research by the industry website Press Gazette estimates that newsrooms received an unprecedented 77 million pounds in the years between 2019 and 2022.
Some of these nonprofits are paid for by public donations and are, at least in principle, answerable to those who give them the money. But public support has been cut too, and compassion fatigue has set in. Filling in the gap, along with the governments who often work closely alongside them, are rich philanthropists. Some are libertarian billionaires, like the Kochs. But most of the money currently flowing into journalism comes from a handful of liberal humanitarians—people like Bill and Melinda Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Pierre Omidyar. These philanthropists may be well-meaning enough, but the truth is that most “activist” NGOs and big foundations aren’t really in the truth-telling business at all, and most have zero interest in journalism and its values per se. Instead, they want to use it to advance their objectives. One of those objectives, lavishly bankrolled by big liberal foundations as well as Google and Facebook, is to address the lack of trust in media by cracking down on “fake news” and “misinformation.” Thus far, it’s mainly meant giving liberal and mainstream media a free pass while turning their “fact-checking” programs on everyone else....
....MUCH MORE
