Big Short author Michael Lewis: ‘Elon Musk has a self-destructive impulse. He’ll blow himself up’

The author has a knack for turning tech nerds and oddballs into narrative gold – but there is one erratic tycoon he won’t write about…

“I don’t like him,” says Michael Lewis when I ask whether he would ever turn his lens on Elon Musk.
“And I have to spend so much time with someone before I can write about them, so it is a requisite that I…” The bestselling American author of The Big Short and Moneyball pauses, scratches his clean-shaven jaw “…maybe not actually like a person, but at least be interested in being in their presence. 
“I have a friend, Walter Isaacson, who wrote a book about Elon, and the whole time he was writing it I just felt sorry for him. Having to spend all that time with [Musk]…” He pulls a face. “I just wouldn’t want to do that.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a male journalist profess anything less than complete fascination with the erratic tech tycoon. But if 63-year-old Lewis has a niche, it’s turning undiscovered nerds and social misfits into gold, dusting off the raw diamonds others haven’t quite spotted. 
Which is just one of the reasons why Hollywood snaps up almost every book he writes, why Vanity Fair famously pays him $10 a word, and why 35 years after the publication of his first book, Liar’s Poker, the one-time bond salesman is now considered a pre-eminent chronicler of American life.
It’s true that if you compare Musk to some of the Louisiana-born writer’s previous subjects – The Big Short’s eccentric hedge-fund manager, Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale), The Blind Side’s American football prodigy, Michael Oher (played by Quinton Aaron), Moneyball’s Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) and the anti-hero of his latest bestseller, Sam Bankman-Fried – maybe Musk is too obviously shiny? Too much of a celebrity?
“Then again, to me, Sam was gold to begin with,” he says of the socially maladjusted founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, whom he trailed for the best part of a year for the book Going Infinite. “There was this quality there that I hadn’t seen before, where he was mapping the world as if it were an undiscovered planet.” Little surprise that Apple has already snapped up the movie rights for $5 million.
After a series of scheduling conflicts, we’re doing the interview on Zoom, with me in LA and Lewis in a rented flat 400 miles away in San Rafael. It’s only an hour from the Berkeley home he shares with his photographer wife (former MTV news reporter Tabitha Soren) and two children Walker, 17, and Quinn, 24, and the background looks so stark the writer’s forced to assure me he’s not “been taken hostage”, but Lewis needs a quiet place to write the “seven scripts” he owes. Then there’s the sequel to his 2018 expose of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition, The Fifth Risk, which will be appearing in serial form in The Washington Post from September 3.
He’s a fun interviewee: perky, fast-talking and youthful-looking in a striped linen shirt. “The very first conversation I ever had with Sam yielded really interesting and bizarre stuff,” he tells me, recalling the first time he met “SBF”, back in 2021, after a friend thinking of investing in the young billionaire’s company asked him to check him out. (He told him: “Go for it! What could possibly go wrong?”) “So I could see that just looking at things through his eyes was going to be really interesting no matter where it went.”
Even with his truffle-hunter nose for a story, Lewis couldn’t have predicted quite how interesting things were going to get: that eight months into trailing the then 29-year-old, Bankman-Fried’s $32 billion-dollar empire would come crashing down, leaving Lewis to wander the empty rooms of the fallen entrepreneur’s luxury Bahamian estate. Neither could he have foreseen that on the very day Going Infinite was published, Bankman-Fried would go on trial for conspiracy and fraud – and be sent down for 25 years.
Although Lewis was forced to switch from profiling a crypto-rockstar to charting his spectacular downfall, you don’t get any sense of dislike or even judgement from him in the book. In fact, the author seems to remain quite charmed by SBF until the end, which didn’t go down well with some critics when the hardback was published last year. “He is portrayed as a modern Robin Hood good guy,” lambasted one, and: “It could be that Lewis got a little too close.”  
Today, Lewis stresses that he never had any intention of defending SBF’s actions, and that “I actually thought he might get 100 years.” But he does still believe that Bankman-Fried was motivated by the desire to do good, he says, and that the ‘Effective Altruism’ movement the entrepreneur was a part of – which aims to change the world for the better in the most efficient way – wasn’t a cynical smokescreen. “I promise you it was not. But what that movement enabled in Sam was essentially a saviour complex. It gave him a sense of his purpose on earth.”
It’s impossible not to see parallels with Musk throughout the book. Both are obviously geniuses, have both publicly discussed their neurodiversity and seem to possess a pathological fear of boredom. But the Tesla CEO isn’t thinking about others, Lewis insists. “I don’t think he cares. He only cares about himself. I think Elon has a venal streak,” he goes on, “a mean streak that Sam never had. Sam is very conflict avoidant. He’s so gentle, like this little furry animal who is so vulnerable. He’s not a pit bull – but Elon is: Elon is looking for a fight.”
We segue onto Musk’s reaction to the UK riots and his shockingly irresponsible comments about “civil war” in the UK being “inevitable”, and I tell Lewis I’m convinced the media mogul will blow himself up in some way. 
“I think he will. But he’s got a bigger fortress than Sam, so it’s going to take more work to blow himself up. Still, you can see him moving in that direction. There’s a kind of self-destructive impulse there.”
A memory bubbles up and Lewis barks out a laugh. “There was a funny moment when Sam was talking about whether they wanted to invest in Twitter. He’d just had a conversation with Musk, and he says: ‘Man, he’s a weird dude.’” Another laugh. “I thought, if Sam Bankman-Fried calls you a weird dude – you are one weird dude.”
Another anecdote that made me laugh in Going Infinite is when, in 2022, Bankman-Fried reveals his plan to pay Donald Trump not to run for president again. Now that would have been “effective altruism”. Without clarifying the source, SBF told the writer that Trump was asking for $5 billion to resign from politics – and that he was looking into the legality of going ahead with this.
“I’ve subsequently learnt that Ryan Salame, Sam’s CEO, is bosom chums with Donald Trump Jr,” says Lewis, grinning. “That was the mechanism. So Sam knew that the information was getting there [to Mar-a-Lago] but he wasn’t sure how real the information coming back was. Like, was this Donald Trump Jr., or was it Trump himself? But whereas Sam’s other big question was ‘Is this legal?’, mine was: ‘What do you think Donald Trump is going to do if you give him $5 billion? He’ll run for president on your $5 billion.”
To say that Lewis isn’t a fan is putting it mildly. “I’ve thought the same thing about Trump forever, which is: it’s not worth hating him.” An exhausted sigh. “I try not to think about him. My strategy with Trump is to use him for my purposes, because that’s what he would do with me. So if I can use him to sell interest in the federal government,” he said, referring to the Fifth Risk sequel, “I’ll do it.”
If he had $5 billion, I push, and it was legal and sure to work, would he pay Trump to pull out of the presidential race now? “Yes!” he flings back, shrill with certainty. “Sure! I think it would be a service to society. There’s this argument that he’s not the cause, he’s the symptom: I don’t believe that. I think Trump is both the cause and the symptom. And the peculiarity about him is that nobody can just replace him; nobody can beat him. You cannot beat him unless you’re crazy like him, and it’s very hard to be crazy like him.”
He closes his eyes, aware that he’s broken his own rule and allowed himself to think about Trump. “There’s a whole mix [of people] in there including a damaged person, and you can’t fake that.” If there’s one good thing to be said about him, he says, it’s that he was able to “surface the anger”. Ask him whether the bottom line is that Americans will vote on the economy, whatever, and he counters: “What’s unclear to me is why voting Trump is voting for the economy. How is he good at the economy? He’s good at giving rich people tax breaks. Rich people will vote for the guy who let them keep their money. That’s true.”
Raised in hurricane-hit New Orleans, Lewis was the eldest child of a corporate attorney “who was a gorgeously handsome man, glib, great with people, and lived a pretty cush life in New Orleans” and a community activist “who was a force in the city and came from very upper crust New Orleans – like the top layer of the top crust”.
He describes himself as “an unbelievably happy kid. I didn’t have anything I was trying to run from. It was all very stable.” So stable his parents still live in the same New Orleans house in which he grew up with his younger brother and sister. “And when I go back home now, I still sleep in the same bedroom I had from the age of seven.”
After studying art history at Princeton University he went on to earn a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics, and today he proudly describes himself as “raised by your system”, having lived in London for seven years and “been nurtured by people like Dominic Lawson, Stephen Fay and Matt Ridley – who published all my first stuff, even though I had no pedigree.”
His first job, as a bond salesman in the yuppie era at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street “was accidental, because I wanted to be a writer,” but fortuitous in that “it gave me a credibility with the Wall Street audience, so that when I come back to anything near that subject people will talk to me. Again, it’s an accident both that I ended up mining this particular scene and that it turned out to be so rich.”
Until three years ago, profiles of Lewis would describe him as being “on a life-long winning streak”. Yes, he had a couple of early divorces (from first wife, Diane de Cordova Lewis and former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner) but even he will admit that he “had never experienced anything but luck” – until a May Tuesday in 2021, when his 19-year-old daughter, Dixie, and her boyfriend, Ross Schultz, were killed in a head-on collision in northern California.
“I don’t know what your experience is with grief,” he says haltingly today, “but up until Dixie died mine was ‘it’s someone else’s problem’. It’s like if you’ve never had cancer, and someone you vaguely know gets cancer, you don’t really know what to say. I mean, I’d experienced grandparents dying – but nothing like this.”
In an effort to “make her death more constructive and to keep her around”, Lewis tells me that he tried to pay particular attention to anything good that could have come out of what happened. “And I did notice right away that I felt I had a pass now – that if someone had experienced loss, I had a path through which to approach them.”
As a writer, a particular problem Lewis encountered was that none of the “25 books people kept sending me” reflected how he was feeling. “I couldn’t seem to find anybody who quite described my grief, and the ‘grief experts’ left me numb with boredom. Now, I know that although my particular experience might not be of use to anyone else, it might let them know that it’s OK to have your own journey.”
Is he saying that he might one day write about this? “I have a drawer full of thoughts about grief and the natural form this wants to take is not a book, actually, but a one-man show.” Really? “I just think that if you dramatise it, and you put people through the feelings in a theatre… I even had my eye out for the right one. I had an actor in mind! But then…” He tails off, shrugs. “I still feel like I’m living it, but maybe there will come a moment when I can do it.”
In a moment, Lewis has to dash off to a parents’ drinks at his son’s school. But before he does, I want to ask him about “my truth”, and the dangers of a feeling-versus-fact movement that has particular pertinence for him, given the controversy that erupted last year when Michael Oher – whose life story was the subject Lewis’s 2006 book, The Blind Side, and the 2009 Oscar-winning movie – alleged that the central part of the story was false.
Just last week [Aug 18th] the retired NFL player told the New York Times that both the book and the film had made him appear stupid and helpless, and that he is now suing the Tuohy family who adopted him for allegedly exploiting his name, image and likeness. “It’s crazy,” says Lewis, “because it’s not what happened.” On the day of our interview, he has only just got off the phone with a journalist who asked him whether it was true that “this white family called you up and got you to write a book so they could be famous”. 
“Now, I lived that story! I know that I had to talk them into letting me do it. So this is insane! But it almost didn’t matter to the journalist because this kid is saying ‘this is what’s true’.”
Lewis admits to having missed the Baby Reindeer explosion, but when I explain what happened – with Netflix billing the hit show “a true story” despite the real life ‘Martha’ never having been convicted of anything – Lewis is appalled. “You can’t do that! Not with a real person. That’s nuts. I remember having a really long conversation with Brad Pitt [who starred in both The Big Short and Moneyball] about what’s acceptable in terms of liberties, and we both concluded that certain things are just irresponsible, and you can’t do them.”
Lewis hasn’t yet chosen the subject of his next book, but if you pare it all down, it’s value he’s captivated by, isn’t it? The things or people society values? And whether they can live up to that or not?
“Exactly right. That’s what makes my socks go up and down. And if I had to trace it back, it’s not hard. It goes back to the first six months at Princeton. I understood, then, that all those people who were supposed failures in New Orleans and didn’t have big careers but were delightful and happy, led their lives so much better than the important East Coast people who were often miserable. I realised that the notion of success is false.” It’s ironic that the insight allowed him to have that success – alongside the rest.  
The paperback of Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite is published by Penguin Press on August 27