Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He's a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.
Combines sharp analysis, intrepid reporting and punchy writing
*Wall Street Journal*
Boisterous and masterfully written . . . Faux's cast of misfits and
con artists never fails to entertain
*Washington Post*
An excoriating attack on crypto and all who sail in her . . . It's
enough to drive the observer slightly nuts. You can find that
energy in Faux's funny, furious book
*LRB*
Offers a shrewdly sceptical view of crypto where [Michael Lewis's]
Going Infinite is stubbornly credulous
*New York Times*
Definitely the best book to read for anyone who wants to understand
what happened with SBF and FTX; I'd argue it's also the best book
to give any general-interest reader who wants to learn more about
why crypto has crashed and burned
*LA Times, 'The 10 Best Tech Books of 2023'*
Number Go Up is a globe-trotting nonfiction picaresque that's as
much fun as you can have reading about financial malfeasance and
blockchain scams. It's a crisp primer that effortlessly ties the
overinflated promise of bitcoin not just to the fraudsters like Sam
Bankman-Fried who peddle it, but to the places in the Global South,
like the Philippines and Cambodia, that are steamrolled by the
fallout when that promise dies, often in spectacular fashion. It's
scathing; it made me snort rage chortles aloud as I read. I would
have finished it in a single sitting if I didn't have to sleep.
*WIRED, 'The 16 Best Books of 2023'*
Of all the books you could read about the pandemic-driven crypto
and NFT pyramid-scheme madness, this is the one. It is
fantastically funny, sceptical, thoughtful and he's willing to
pursue every part of the story. The chapter in which he
investigates the effects of crypto-based gaming in the Philippines
is devastating. The sequence where he risks his savings by buying
an extremely ugly Bored Ape in order to get into a party is
laugh-out-loud hilarious.
*Naomi Alderman*
An appalled, Wolfe-ian look at the barely concealed cynicism and
grift that fuelled and continue to fuel cryptocurrency's vast
speculative bubble . . . No one comes out of this well, from Tony
Blair and Bill Clinton cosying up to Bankman-Fried to an endless
parade of celebrities shilling for crypto . . . Recount[s] the end
of an era
*Spectator*
Faux demonstrates his incisive grasp of the story with the very
first words of his prologue . . . In telling his story, Faux has
one major advantage over [Michael] Lewis: almost from the start, he
had crypto's number
*LA Times*
Funny, enraging, racy and profound. We were waiting for the first
great crypto book and Zeke Faux has written it
*Butler to the World*
The superior guide to understanding the FTX debacle and
Bankman-Fried himself . . . This is the strength of Number Go Up:
it doesn't pretend there's something inside, just beyond our reach.
Instead, Faux explores how flimsy the whole crypto industry really
is
*Wired*
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the mass
delusion that was crypto
*The Smartest Guys in the Room*
Laugh-out-loud funny . . . An often hilarious courtside view of the
recent mania - and a useful reminder to blockchain evangelists
about the many, many sleazy characters who inhabit their realm.
Well worth a read
*Fortune*
This often funny, often tragic analysis of the rise and fall of
cryptocurrencies and their champions shows human vanity and
weakness at their most destructive . . . It is hard to think of any
book or film with a cast as odious, as indifferent to the
consequences of their shakedowns, as arrogant, or as voracious as
the hustlers launching one ICO 'opportunity' after another . . .
This well-written, pacey book is difficult to put down because you
wonder how the swizz of the previous chapter might be surpassed -
as it nearly always is
*Irish Examiner*
It's terrific. Each chapter, each scheme somehow stranger, funnier
and more enraging than the last. A whole economy layered like a
French pastry of Ponzi schemes
*Scott Tobias, The Next Picture Show*
The funniest financial journalist in America takes on the funniest
story in modern finance
*Matt Levine, author of Businessweek’s Money Stuff*
Unlike every other crypto book . . . I just couldn't put it down .
. . The real beauty of this book is in the little details. It's
what makes it read like fiction, even though it's all unfortunately
horrifyingly real
*Blockworks.co*
[In his book Going Infinite, Michael] Lewis reveals little about
the inner workings of crypto . . . For those wanting a rollicking -
albeit jaundiced - examination of crypto's underbelly, read Mr
Faux's book
*The Economist*
The best book yet written about cryptocurrency
*Bits about Money*
Not only a breath of fresh air but quite possibly the best book
ever written about the cryptocurrency industry
*Protos*
Both a serious financial investigation and incredibly entertaining
... Faux seems to be the only one asking uncomfortable
questions
*No Filter*
Ludicrously compelling. I, quite literally, couldn't put it down -
and I don't even care about crypto. Zeke Faux writes about this
world with such clarity, humor, and perspective that the portrait
captures something even larger: a moment in time that we can't
afford not to understand
*Joe Biden: American Dreamer*
A dizzying safari of the surreal ... Zeke Faux takes readers behind
the velvet rope and onto the mega yachts and multimillion-dollar
tropical compounds of the billionaire crypto schemers, hustlers,
and evangelists who may all be headed to prison, but are having a
riotously good time
*The Devil’s Bargain*
Business journalists are not usually lauded for their bravery, but
it takes guts to gaze into the abyss of late-stage capitalism,
never mind parachute directly into it. [Number Go Up] is a kind of
hero's journey . . . Riveting
*Inventing Anna*
An instant classic: Liar's Poker for the era of digital monkey
tokens
*Dead in the Water*
The definitive book about crypto and the only one you'll want to
read
*The Contrarian*
Faux does an excellent job [of] digging into the personalities and
hype . . . A lot of things about crypto finally clicked into place
for me after reading this book
*The Verge*
Eye popping . . . one of the tensest things I've ever read
*Herald Scotland*
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