The smoke hasn’t even cleared on the billion dollar FTX cryptocurrency scandal, yet Hollywood is looking to tell the story.
Deadline is reporting Michael Lewis, who spent a year documenting now-disgraced one-time crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, was working on a book about the figure. Now, there’s already a bidding war afoot to bring it to the big screen.
While cryptocurrency is a dense topic for your average movie audience, Lewis’ book about the dry matter of baseball statistics was shaped into the Oscar-nominated movie Moneyball; his financial scandal book The Big Short inspired the Oscar-winning script for the movie of the same name, and Lewis’ work The Blind Side ended up netting Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Academy Award for its big screen adaptation.
Bankman-Fried’s story stretches from Washington, D.C. to Hollywood to Ukraine; the supposed wunderkind graced the covers of magazines like Forbes, and he became one of the largest Democratic party donors in the world.
What was once the third-largest crypto exchange has all the ingredients for a ripped-from-the-headlines movie: sex, scandal, celebrity, and money. Stars like Tom Brady and Larry David promoted the cryptocurrency, while Bankman-Fried and his friends reportedly lived like rock stars in the Bahamas. Fast-forward to today, and a billion dollars is gone.
The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing next month to investigate, with Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters — reportedly one of the recipients of Bankman-Fried’s donations, as were many in DC — saying, “The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds.”
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