Ben Mezrich – författare

Berättelsen om aktiesensationen som vände upp och ner på finansvärlden

»Ben Mezrich blåser nytt liv i GameStop-affären med sin skildring av de färgstarka personligheter och det företagsdrama som utgjorde bränslet bakom den.« New York Post väljer Dumb Money till en av Årets bästa böcker

I början av 2021 inträffade en av de mest spektakulära händelserna i modern tid på den amerikanska aktiemarknaden. GameStop - en butikskedja för fysiska tv-spel som många betraktade som en dinosaurie på väg att gå i graven - såg sin aktiekurs rusa till förbluffande höjder. Berättelsen om hur detta gick till och varför tar oss till ett diskussionsforum på Reddit. Vad hände egentligen? Vilka var de bakomliggande orsakerna? I Dumb Money skildrar Ben Mezrich på ett knivskarpt och underhållande sätt GameStop aktiens sensationella utveckling, och ger en fängslande inblick i hur moderna kommunikationsverktyg och undertryckta aggressioner vände upp och ner på finansvärlden. Under resans gång får vi träffa både privatpersoner och stora aktörer, som alla på sitt sätt var med och skapade vad som skulle bli de senaste decenniernas största aktiesensation. I översättning av Manne Svensson.

BEN MEZRICH är en amerikansk författare vars böcker om den moderna finans- och företagsvärlden blivit stora försäljningssuccéer. 2009 kom The Accidental Billionaires, om Facebooks grundare, som blev en stor framgång och även adapterades till storfilmen The Social Network i regi av David Fincher. Dumb Money är Mezrichs senaste bok - först publicerad under titeln The Antisocial Network - som även den blivit en bästsäljare och kommer att filmatiseras av Metro Goldwyn Meyer, i regi av Craig Gillespie. 

»Ben Mezrich berättar historien om GameStop genom en uppsjö av karaktärer, i synnerhet småinvesterare med liten eller ingen erfarenhet av aktiemarknaden.« Wall Street Journal

»Mezrich frammanar sina scener på ett så levande sätt att man inte bara tycker sig känna personerna på sidorna, utan tycker sig vara i samma rum som dem.« Porchlight

Ugly Americans is the true story of John Malcolm, a Princeton graduate who traveled halfway around the world in search of the American dream and pulled off a trade that could be described as the biggest deal in the history of the financial markets.

Without speaking a word of Japanese, with barely a penny in his pocket, Malcolm was thrown into the bizarre life of an ex-pat trader. Surrounded by characters ripped right out of a Hollywood thriller, he quickly learned how to survive in a cutthroat world -- at the feet of the biggest players the markets have ever known.

Malcolm was first an assistant trading huge positions for Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings Bank -- the oldest in England. He was the right-hand man to an enigmatic and brilliant hedge-fund cowboy, Dean Carney, and grew into one of the biggest derivatives traders in all of Asia. Along the way, Malcolm fell in love with the daughter of a Yakuza gangster, built a vast fortune out of thin air, and came head to head with violent Japanese mobsters. Malcolm and his twentysomething, Ivy League-schooled colleagues rode the crashing waves of the Asian markets during the mid-to late 1990s, culminating in a single deal the likes of which had never been seen before, or since.

A real-life mixture of Liar’s Poker and Wall Street, brimming with intense action, romance, underground sex, vivid locales, and exotic characters, Ugly Americans is the untold, true story that will rock the financial community and redefine an era.

Semyon Dukach was known as the darling of Las Vegas. A legend at twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn''t stop -- a system that had nothing to do with card counting, wasn''t illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown -- Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. While they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables, only to be banned from casinos, harassed, on the wrong end of guns, and beaten in the notorious back rooms of casinos.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, the consequences be damned. In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable. Busting Vega$ is Dukach''s unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

From New York Times bestselling author Ben Mezrich, a fast-paced techno-thriller about a biological virus that spreads electronically.

In Boston, nine lawyers on a conference call suddenly convulse with pain, turn chalk white, and die. In Vermont, a young woman watching her favorite sitcom meets the same grisly fate, as does a group of sewer workers in Washington, D.C. Whatever has killed these people is spreading fast, and the task of eradicating it falls to young virologist Samantha Craig and paramedic Nick Barnes, whose brilliant surgical career was ruined by a crippling hand injury.

When Nick and Samantha discover that the virus, named Reaper, is spread through TVs and PCs, they realize that the information superhighway will become a killing field, with tens of millions dead, unless they can root Reaper out.

Their search employs a dazzling array of real-life wizardry, from Mylar body paint to Stealth helicopters to CIA-bred swarms of insects. At the core of Reaper’s madness, they find a suavely megalomaniacal, up-from-the-slums, high-tech billionaire, an icily ingenious hacker, and a high-powered cabal that will do anything to save the world from technology, even if that means annihilating the world.

From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, this is the startling rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.

After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylumlike oil exchange located in lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbagemen become millionaires overnight and where fistfights break out on the trading floor.

This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai. He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo—teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheiks—and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing. But the Merc is just a starting place. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry—and, along with it, the world. Rigged is the explicit, exclusive, true story behind the headlines that dominate the world stage.

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine -- but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn''t stop — a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn''t illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown — Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas''s notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Busting Vega$ is Dukach''s unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

Ben Mezrich, author of the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, returns with an astonishing story of Ivy League hedge-fund cowboys, high stakes, and the Asian underworld.

John Malcolm was the ultimate gunslinger in the Wild East, prepared to take on any level of risk in making mind-boggling sums of money. He and his friends were hedge-fund cowboys, living life on the adrenaline-, sex-, and drugs-fueled edge—kids running billion-dollar portfolios, trading information in the back rooms of high-class brothels and at VIP tables in nightclubs across the Far East.

Malcolm and his Ivy League-schooled twenty-something colleagues, with their warped sense of morality, created their own economic theory that would culminate in a single deal the likes of which had never been seen before—or since.

Ugly Americans is a story of extremes, charged with wealth, nerve, excess, and glamour. A real-life mixture of Liar''s Poker and Wall Street, brimming with intense action, romance, underground sex, vivid locales, and exotic characters, Ugly Americans is the untold true story that rocked the financial community.

From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down The House, Rigged is the startling, rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.

Black Gold. Texas Tea. Everybody wants oil but only a rare few have truly made a killing mastering its intricacies. One of those lucky bastards is Johnny Castino, a ballsy Italian-American from Brooklyn with an ego and a keen intelligence to match his ambition. Rigged is his story: a startling rags-to-riches tale of an ordinary kid turned Harvard grad who found himself caught up in the ultimate high-stakes adventure filled with money, sex, exotic locales, life-threatening danger, and extraordinary international consequences.

Moving from the streets of Brooklyn to Dubai, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Jakarta, Moscow, and Shanghai, Rigged reveals how the business is run and what happened when a man with solid gold cajones decided to flip a business—and an entire Exchange—on its head.

Fatal Flesh

When moonlighting medical students "harvesting" skin from a corpse for temporary use accidentally take it from the wrong donor, the results are catastrophic:a New York City hospital ward is destroyed in a bloodbath, and an elderly professor, admitted for a routine skin graft, is suddenly the city''s most wanted fugitive.

Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the only ones to suspect something more ominous than a medical procedure gone awry. As the FBI agents investigating the "X-Files"--strange and inexplicable cases the Bureau wants to keep hidden--Mulder and Scully are determined to track down the forces they suspect are behind the murderer.

While the police hunt the fleeing professor, Mulder and Scully track the skin that was grafted onto him, a trail that leads from the morgue to the headquarters of a cutting-edge biotech company to the jungles of Thailand. Together they begin to uncover an unholy and totally deniable alliance between a battle-trained plastic surgeon, international politicians, and a legendary Thai monster known as the "Skin-Eater."

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the film The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world. 

Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, Straight Flush tells of the company’s initial operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica—where its founders embraced an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money—and of the gray area of U.S. and international law in which they created an industry. Soon, the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them… Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the films The Social Network and 21— comes the larger-than-life true tale of a group of American college buddies who brilliantly built a billion-dollar online poker colossus based out of the hedonistic paradise of Costa Rica.

One problem: the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them. . . .

Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich's Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world, on par with some of the behemoths of the Internet. At its height, Absolute Poker was an online empire earning more than a million dollars a day, following savvy business strategy and even better luck. Its founders set up their operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica, embracing an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money.

Meanwhile, the gray area of U.S. and international law in which the company operated was becoming a lot more risky, and soon the U.S. Department of Justice had placed a bull's-eye on Absolute Poker. Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.