Zeke Faux

Zeke Faux is an award-winning investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News where he has spent over a decade profiling and exposing the hustlers, scammers, and hedge fund managers who populate the shady side of Wall Street. Despite his initial suspicions of the industry and self-professed love for investigating weird scams, he avoided covering cryptocurrency in his reporting. That is until a bout of FOMO led him on a two-year globe-trotting quest to get to the bottom of the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen. The result is his critically acclaimed debut book Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

Released shortly before Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite, Faux’s Number Go Up is widely recognized by critics as the superior work on Sam Bankman-Fried and the saga surrounding the fall of FTX. As a reporter, Faux had a front row seat to the booming crypto industry at its peak and maintained levels of access that had him in SBF’s penthouse in the Bahamas just before the police hauled him away. Not to be mistaken for a vapid extended profile on the temporarily luxurious lives of overnight crypto billionaires, the book also reveals the darker sides of crypto, from what happens when assets as volatile as Bitcoin become a country’s legal tender to the ways the technology makes human trafficking easier and less traceable. In an interesting turn of events, Number Go Up was used as evidence by the prosecution in the federal trial against SBF that ultimately found him guilty on all counts.

Frequently lauded for its laugh-out-loud nature, Number Go Up is also a “serious financial investigation” where “Zeke Faux seems to be the only one asking the uncomfortable questions,” according to award-winning author Sarah Frier. The book was called “ludicrously compelling” by New Yorker staff writer and fellow Leigh Bureau speaker Evan Osnos who said, “I, quite literally, couldn’t put it down—and I don’t even care about crypto.” It is a masterful exemplar of his life’s work investigating business ethics that meets the current moment’s crypto frenzy.

Faux is a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award, and was named a finalist for the National Magazine Award.