Shop - 《HARDCOVER EDITION》BILLION DOLLAR WHALE : The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, And the World

Billion Dollar Whale will become a classic, harrowing parable about the financial world in the twenty-first century.Now a #1 international bestseller, Billion Dollar Whale is “an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale” ( Publishers Weekly), 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. Billion Dollar Whale is a very readable and well-written condensation of the decade long kleptocratic 1Malaysia Development Berhad scam that centered around one pathetic greedy moron called Jho Low.
 
The spoiled cowardly manchild who came from a moderately rich family of Penang who dreamed of fame and luxury. By sheer luck and his connections to those of wealth and fortune, he became a self-made crazy rich Asian billionaire.
 
Of course, none of it would have happened if Mr Low hadn’t surround himself with his enablers from middle eastern princes to bankers to Hollywood A-listers to politicians who got suck into this web of lies and ill-begotten wealth that was funded by and debt paid by us millions of Malaysian taxpayers.

Sadly, there will be people who look up to Jho Low. Who see him as a genius mastermind who duped everyone for a grand short-lived adventure.
 
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KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
Wall Street Journal reporters Wright and Hope tell the story of a massive international financial scandal they initially exposed in the newspaper in 2015, reporting that made them finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.
 
The fraud centers on one man, Malaysian-born Jho Low, who by age 20 had begun figuring out how lies about his own background, combined with careful study of international financial markets, could enrich him. By age 30, Low had fooled even sophisticated international bankers into investing billions of dollars into fraudulent companies he created.
 
Much of the book is set in the United States, where Low attended college, resided part-time, and identified his credulous marks, which included dealmakers at the mammoth Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, among many others. Many American readers will not have a solid background in Malaysian affairs; a strength of this account is the authors’ explication of how Malaysian culture and politics helped enable Low to carry out his schemes.
 
The “whale” of the title is slang for a high-rolling gambler, an apt description of Low. He did not gamble with his own money, however. Instead, he used billions of dollars raised from corrupt governments and wealthy individual investors to finance his lavish lifestyle, which the authors describe meticulously.
 
The partying included celebrities from around the globe, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, fashion models, and Kanye West and other hip-hop stars. A major irony documented by the authors was the creation of a movie studio by Low using stolen cash; the studio would produce the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the memoir by financial fraudster Jordan Belfort. Despite all the evidence against him, the question remains: “Will Low ever be brought to justice?”
 
As the authors amply prove, the scandal reaches far beyond Low. To succeed, he relied on the naiveté, greed, and generally immoral conduct of huge banks as well as corrupt governments.
 
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About the Authors
 
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.
 
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.