Sam Bankman-Fried enraged Anna Wintour with his last-minute cancellation to attend the Met Gala — leading her staffers to tell the shlubby crypto king he’ll “never step foot in fashion again,” according to a new book.
The indicted FTX founder, whose much-anticipated fraud trial began in New York on Tuesday, was offered the coveted invite by Wintour during a Zoom meeting on Valentine’s Day in 2022, writes Michael Lewis in his new book “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.”
A distracted Bankman-Fried was playing video games while listening to Wintour’s pitch to attend the prestigious fashion event and even asked him to use his vast wealth to support the fund-raiser, Lewis wrote.
Bankman-Fried continued to multitask between listening to Wintour — who fawned over the cargo shorts-and-T-shirt-wearing crypto bro — and engaging in a series of battles in the good-versus-evil “Storybook Brawl” game, according to the book.
“Sam didn’t really know who Anna Wintour was,” Lewis wrote in an excerpt published by The Times of London. “He knew Anna Wintour edited a magazine. He might or might not have been dimly aware that Meryl Streep had played her in ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’”
Over the course of their mostly one-sided conversation, his clipped responses consisted of “Yup.” “Awesome!” “That makes a ton of sense.” “Yeah, I would love to!”
And finally, “See ya!”
It wasn’t until he hung up that he began dreading that he accepted her invitation to the May 2, 2022, event.
“Sam set aside his disdain for the fashion industry and tried to do some math. Four billion women on the planet. Let’s say one in a thousand of them pays attention to the Met Gala. Let’s say one in a hundred of those gets interested in FTX,” Lewis wrote.
“But it felt like trying to comb his hair when he had chewing gum stuck in it. His mind couldn’t even really get past the need for him to change out of his cargo shorts. And yet he allowed the decision to just sit there, festering, for months.”
Wintour, meanwhile, was under the impression that Bankman-Fried would attend and even pay for the entire thing, per Lewis. After all, Bankman-Fried’s wealth at the time was reportedly peaking at $26.5 billion, as investors were valuing FTX at some $40 billion.
Bankman-Fried waited until the day before the event, May 1, to tell FTX’s head of public relations Natalie Tien to contact Wintour’s team about his decision to skip the gala, according to the book.
“They called and shouted and said Sam will never set foot in fashion again!” Tien told Lewis.
At that point, FTX’s marketing people called off the projects they had been working on to make Bankman-Fried’s Met Gala debut a successful one, including telling Louis Vuitton to ditch its plans to create an elevated version of the 31-year-old’s signature dressed-down look, Lewis wrote.
The team also reportedly had to alert Tom Ford that there wouldn’t be any use for the more-conventional outfit the designer was tasked with creating — which reportedly included a pair of cufflinks for a cool $65,000.
A person familiar with the matter contradicted Lewis’ account of the Zoom call, telling The Post that the meeting between Wintour and Bankman-Fried was set up to discuss other fund-raising opportunities rather than the Met Gala.
Bankman-Fried’s team separately reached out to Vogue asking to be considered for sponsorship at the star-studded event, the source said.
A Vogue spokesperson told The Post that the account of Bankman-Fried and Wintour in Lewis’ book are “not accurate, nor were we given the opportunity to fact check.”
Since that fateful Zoom call, Bankman-Fried has traded cufflinks for handcuffs.
The ex-billionaire was indicted on fraud and conspiracy stemming from FTX’s collapse in November 2022.
Prosecutors allege Bankman-Fried stole billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits to plug losses at Alameda Research, a crypto-focused hedge fund he controlled.
He has pleaded not guilty. Bankman-Fried, 31, faces up to 110 years in prison if convicted.
The trial began Tuesday with jury selection.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
