A Brief Book Review of Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Warren Buffett in a speech to University of Florida MBA students in 1998 suggested you could assess a person by three traits, namely their integrity, intelligence, and energy. To stress the comparative value of those traits, he then made a provocative point: He said that if you could only pick two of those three traits to maximize in who you hire, you would be wise to choose integrity as one of the two because a person with intelligence and energy but no integrity would ruin you. This is a book about such a person. It’s about Jho Low, an intelligent and energetic young man with zero integrity. Low used global financial systems and deep human desires for money and prestige to commit one of history’s most brazen frauds. In just a few years, using lavish spending the modern world had perhaps never seen before, he gained the confidence and following of well-known celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, and Miranda Kerr. This allowed him to access Middle East royal wealth, who, despite their money, didn’t have his penchant for courting Hollywood celebrities. These wealthy Middle East connections in turn gained Low the backing of leading banks, law firms, and auditors, allowing him the cover he needed to bilk billions from the people of Malaysia. The conman is still at-large. A great, supremely detailed, and well-reported book of modern power and corruption.