Michael Lewis, born October 15, 1960, in New Orleans, Louisiana, is the rare writer who can make high-stakes finance, pandemic preparedness, and crypto fraud read like airport thrillers—without ever dumbing anything down. Over four decades, he has produced a string of bestsellers that don’t just explain complicated systems; they humanize them, finding the eccentric characters who quietly (or loudly) steer the world.
From Salomon Brothers to Literary Stardom
Lewis graduated from Princeton in 1982 with a degree in art history, then earned an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics. In 1985 he talked his way into a job as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, the most aggressive (and infamous) trading floor on Wall Street. Three years later, after the 1987 crash and amid the insider-trading scandals that toppled the firm, he quit to write Liar’s Poker (1989).
The book was meant to be an exposé of Wall Street greed and absurdity. Instead it became the accidental calling card for a generation of college students who read it and thought, “I want to do that.” Lewis has spent the rest of his career apologizing for unintentionally glamorizing the industry he set out to mock.
The Hits That Redefined Narrative Nonfiction
Moneyball (2003) – The story of how the cash-strapped Oakland A’s used statistics to compete with the Yankees. It launched the analytics revolution in sports and gave Brad Pitt one of his best roles.
The Big Short (2010) – A darkly comic autopsy of the 2008 financial crisis told through the handful of misfits who saw the housing bubble coming and bet against it. The 2015 film won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Flash Boys (2014) – Exposed high-frequency trading and the secret arms race inside Wall Street’s fiber-optic cables. It triggered an FBI investigation and forced exchanges to rethink how markets actually work.
The Fifth Risk (2018) – A quieter, more alarming book about the unsung civil servants who keep the government running—and what happens when political appointees have no idea what those people actually do.
Going Infinite (2023) – The rise and catastrophic fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Written with extraordinary access right up to the moment of arrest, it is both a character study of a possible sociopath and a cautionary tale about crypto’s Wild West era.
Style and Secret Sauce
Lewis writes like a novelist who happens to be reporting. He finds the one person in the room who sees what everyone else misses—Billy Beane, Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Brad Katsuyama, Sam Bankman-Fried—and lets them carry the narrative. Complex ideas (collateralized debt obligations, front-running by millisecond, effective altruism) are never explained in sidebars; they arrive naturally through the eyes of people who live them.
Critics sometimes accuse him of hero worship or oversimplification. Lewis counters that he’s not writing policy papers—he’s writing about human beings making decisions under pressure. The systems only become interesting, he says, when you see the weirdos inside them.
Personal Life
Lewis has been married since 1994 to former MTV news anchor Tabitha Soren, famous in the 1990s for interviewing Tupac and for having a pie smashed in her face by the Beastie Boys. They have three children and split their time between Berkeley, California, and a farm in Virginia. Their youngest daughter, Dixie, died tragically in a 2024 car accident at age 19.
Legacy
At 65, Michael Lewis occupies a singular place in American letters: the guy who can sell a million copies explaining credit-default swaps or the Department of Energy’s loan-guarantee program. He has changed how we think about baseball, finance, weather forecasting (The Premonition, 2021), and now cryptocurrency.
In an age of 280-character hot takes, Lewis still believes the best way to understand a complicated world is to find a great character and follow them around until the larger truth reveals itself. So far, the world keeps providing him with characters. And he keeps turning them into stories we can’t put down.