Overview

"Now a #1 international bestseller, BILLION DOLLAR WHALE is ""an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale"" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street. By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation. BILLION DOLLAR WHALE has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world."

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9780316436472

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Reviews

As Bad Blood is to biotech, Billion Dollar Whale is to international finance... a wonderful read... Thrilling. --Bill Gates I highly recommend this rip-roaring story of brazen fraud..., political corruption..., and investment-banker callousness. --Adam Lashinsky, FORTUNE An incredible story.... If you need some billionaires to despise--look no further than these charlatans. --Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit One of the most important books of 2018. --MoneyLaundering.com One of the best business books in a long time. --Brian Sullivan, CNBC An incredible story. --Knowledge@Wharton A cracking read. --Unreserved Media A wonderful book... A rip-roaring, absolutely delightful account of one of the biggest financial cons in the history of the world.... If you liked Bad Blood, you might well enjoy Billion Dollar Whale... An incredible story of a con artist at the height of his game. --David Plotz, Slate Political Gabfest Compelling. --Minneapolis Star Tribune Take one chubby Malaysian business school graduate. Mix with Middle Eastern sheikhs and greedy Southeast Asian politicians. Add Wall Street investment banks, law firms and Swiss wealth managers. Then mix in superyachts, five-star hotels, luxury apartments, nightclubs, models, A-list movie stars--and bathtubs of champagne... [This] richly reported page-turner is meticulously pieced together from interviews, documents and emails by Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. --Peter Thal Larsen, Reuters Gripping.... The heist of the century. --Axios An extraordinary tale.... richly woven...[with] dogged reporting.... Like all good business stories, Billion Dollar Whale is bigger than the immediate one it tells. It is a story of emerging markets crippled by corruption and cronyism and comes from the era of egregious--and mostly punishment-free--banking.... One thing is clear. If ever Hollywood gets round to telling the story on screen, here is perfect material for the script. --Financial Times Well-researched and well-documented.... Reveals how Low used a bag of tricks, including financial fraud, to make himself seem more powerful, more influential, and more successful than he actually was... This is a must-read. --Booklist Wright and Hope transform their investigation of a mind-boggling financial fraud into a nonfiction thriller... This is an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) An amazing tale of greed.... juicy and entertaining. --Library Journal (starred review) The story of a massive international financial scandal... As the authors amply prove, the scandal reaches far beyond Low. To succeed, he relied on the naivete, greed, and generally immoral conduct of huge banks as well as corrupt governments. --Kirkus Even the most skilled fiction writer would have trouble conjuring the corrupt and colorful protagonist of Billion Dollar Whale. Bradley Hope and Tom Wright's gripping portrait of Jho Low and his enablers throughout the global financial system will both fascinate and enrage you. --Sheelah Kolhatkar, staff writer at The New Yorker and New York Times bestselling author of Black Edge This story of a Wharton graduate who carried out the $5 billion swindle known as 1MDB offers a textbook case of financial fraud in the modern age. --New York Times Wright and Hope deliver a scintillating and prodigiously reported tale of a globe-spanning modern Gatsby and his audacious fraud. --Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for ProPublica and author of The Chickenshit Club If you like global intrigue, financial crime, wealth porn, and absurdity, Billion Dollar Whale, by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, is for you.... It almost seems made up. Still, anyone who has followed the news out of Malaysia will know that the story is all too real. --The New Yorker What a blast to read! A true life thriller that reads like a Hollywood movie, Billion Dollar Whale traces the exploits of the most mercurial, mysterious big player in history. Jho Low is Gatsby with twice the bank account and ten times the ambition, and the stories surrounding his exploits leap right off the page! --Ben Mezrich, New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down The House A Fortune magazine Best Book of 2018 A Financial Times Best Book of 2018

Author Information

"Bradley Hope (Author) Bradley Hope has worked for the Wall Street Journal for the last four years, covering finance and malfeasance from New York City and London. Before that, he spent six years as a correspondent in the Middle East, where he covered the Arab Spring uprisings from Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis, and Beirut. He was detained by authorities in Bahrain, reported from the front lines of the Libyan civil war, and has been teargassed in raucous Egyptian protests. Bradley is a Pulitzer finalist and a Loeb winner, and also author of Last Days of the Pharaoh, a chronicle of the final days and hours of the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. Tom Wright (Author) Tom Wright was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the raid in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. In 2013, he spearheaded coverage of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,000 people, earning the Wall Street Journal a Sigma Delta Chi award from The Society of Professional Journalists. He is a Pulitzer finalist, a Loeb winner, and has garnered numerous awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia, which in 2016 named him ""Journalist of the Year."" He speaks English, Malay, French and Italian."

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