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Michael Novogratz was in a good mood. It was the thirtieth reunion of Princeton’s class of 1987, and the on-again, off-again billionaire was getting a lot of respect. “I want to hit you up about something,” a two-star general said.
“Those are the freshest kicks,” a young bro in a dressing gown observed, complimenting Novogratz’s black patent shoes with orange piping and matching tassels.
(“It’s all about peacocking,” Novogratz later told me, of his sartorial extravagance.) He huddled with Joseph Lubin, a former roommate and one of the co-founders of the hit cryptocurrency platform Ethereum.
It was a warm June day, last year, and the Princetonians were amiably crushing cans of Bud amid chants of “Tiger, tiger, tiger, sis sis sis, boom boom boom, ah!”
The alumni parade, known as the P-rade, started to wind through the neo-Gothic campus, its mob of participants marching past signs for a symposium entitled “Can America Still Lead?” As we joined the P-rade, we heard shouts of “Novo! Novo! Novo!” He stopped by a gaggle of young wrestlers, all of whom seemed monumentally drunker than the rest of Princeton’s population—a notable distinction. Novogratz, formerly the captain of the college’s wrestling team, slapped a half-naked man on the back so hard that he left a red palm print. “I five-starred a guy!” he shouted as we continued down the P-rade, men running up to him as if he were the mayor of a small Sicilian hill town. “Mr.
Novogratz! I’m Goldman corporate trading!”
Princeton, like Wall Street, where Novogratz has made at least three fortunes and lost at least two, is full of stories about him. There was the story of how Novogratz never showed up for R.O.T.C. (he was admitted to Princeton on an R.
O.T.C. scholarship). And the time, at the previous reunion, when he flew a helicopter—Novogratz did a year’s worth of helicopter-pilot training, at the Army’s flight school in Alabama—down Prospect Avenue, nearly clipping a gate. “He’s bombastic and he’s full of shit,” one of his friends said, “but he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.
” Novogratz, who is properly bald, with a pair of sharp blue eyes and a gravelly voice that can go full Muppet after a volley of drinks, was, uncharacteristically, sober. At the behest of his wife, he was preparing himself for an eleven-day Vipassana meditation retreat in Wales. “I’m trying to regrow my discipline muscle,” he told me as we approached the Tudor hulk of the Tiger Inn, his eating club, where a beer-pong tournament was already well under way in the basement.
Novogratz had risen quickly, at Goldman Sachs and in the hedge-fund world, but each rise was met with a stunning, often humiliating reversal—first a parting with Goldman, in 2000, over what has been referred to in the press as “lifestyle issues,” and then the removal from his partnership, in 2015, at the high-flying Fortress Group after losing a series of currency bets. Once worth north of two billion dollars, Novogratz had been reduced to the ranks of mere centimillionaires. But 2017 was proving to be pivotal for him and a motley band of other sidelined investors seeking redemption—think the Winklevoss twins—as they tethered themselves to the year’s most befuddling financial event: the rise of cryptocurrency.
Novogratz had recognized its potential when one of his partners at Fortress, Peter Briger, introduced him to one of its earlier evangelists, an Argentinean investor named Wences Casares. In 2013, Novogratz put seven million dollars of his own money in cryptocurrency investments when bitcoin was selling at around a hundred dollars a coin.
(A single coin currently sells for more than sixty times that amount.) Citing his luck at being in the right place at the right time, Novogratz has called himself “the Forrest Gump of bitcoin.”
Novogratz’s crypto bets had coaxed him out of self-imposed retirement, and soon sprang him back onto CNBC and Bloomberg.
Late last year, as the G.O.P.’s tax bill barrelled through Congress, he called Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, an “idiot” (spelling out the word, for good measure) and rebuked Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn for the tax overhaul, saying that he “shouldn’t be able to live with himself.” Both Mnuchin and Cohn had been partners alongside Novogratz at Goldman Sachs, and this made for an unusual breach of Goldman etiquette.
To cap off the reunion, Novogratz had paid for a concert by Duran Duran. “Every five years, he does us well,” a classmate told me.
Even in the middle of a streak of sobriety, it was hard for Novogratz to say no to a good party. “We’re a family of near-alcoholics,” he joked earlier that day, referring to the hungover crowd at a Princeton brunch that included his wife, Sukey Cáceres, also an alum, and their four children, three of whom have attended the university. The night ended with a touch of eighties style and contemporary dissonance. As gracefully aging Princetonians drained the booze from their red plastic cups, Simon Le Bon, dressed in what looked like a swath of green vinyl, belted out “A View to a Kill,” and, in one corner, Ted Cruz (class of ’92) darkly made his presence known.
In the past decade, a large number of the friends I had come of age with in Manhattan left the city, displaced by rising costs to Berlin or Los Angeles or the mid-Hudson Valley. These friends, many of whom were fellow-alumni of my alma maters, Stuyvesant High School and Oberlin College, were writers, graphic designers, architects, academics, and journalists—the heart of what used to be the creative middle class.
As I walked down the now unfamiliar streets of my city, eying a new breed of closely cropped, athletic individuals, I kept wondering, Who are these people? Eventually, I discovered that they worked mostly for banks or hedge funds or private-equity firms.
Around 2012, I decided that my next novel would be about finance. When I first broached the idea of making a fund manager the hero to a friend whose husband works in the industry, she asked me, “Why would you do that? Bankers have no imagination.” (In my research, wives saying unflattering things about their spouses became a consistent theme.)
Do bankers have imagination? That statement felt both like a challenge and like a lodestar for my work. I would find hedge funders worth writing about or invent my own.
More than a few reminded me of Novogratz’s wrestling friends—scrappy lower-middle-class kids from the peripheries of New York or Naples or Moscow.
As a hungry, insecure kid growing up in eastern Queens, I remember watching the movie “.