Why Did Michael Lewis Wait Until Sam Bankman-Fried Was in Jail?

Sam Fragoso said critics attacked how Michael Lewis does the job. Lewis says the attack is dumb. The job is to get to know the person. If he had drawn a grotesque caricature that encouraged the people who hated Sam Bankman-Fried most, the portrait would fail to explain how Bankman-Fried happened. There is a reason people gave Bankman-Fried money, a reason people wanted to work for him, and a reason politicians wanted to be with him. Lewis says the reader has to feel the reasons, or the shock of the story disappears. He would be more open to a critique that named facts the reader needed and that he had left out. When the critique is only that he was too nice, he says he was describing Bankman-Fried. He did not start the book until Bankman-Fried was in jail. He wanted to know what had happened.

Fragoso asked whether a reporter can get too close, and when Lewis last talked to Bankman-Fried. Lewis says he is not close to Sam Bankman-Fried at all, and Bankman-Fried is not his friend. You cannot talk to him, Lewis says, because he is in jail. Bankman-Fried sends a prison diary to an email list. Lewis is on the list, and he has not spoken to Bankman-Fried in years.