Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

Bradley Hope · Tom Wright

Sep 2018 · Hachette Audio · Narrated by Will Collyer

About this audiobook

Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this "thrilling" (Bill Gates) New York Times bestseller exposes how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in "the heist of the century" (Axios).

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.

Ratings and reviews

Shocking. A prime minister who used up coffers money just to maintain his opulent lifestyle with his wife and to maintain political power, a insecure conman who wanted to live a glitzy lifestyle and feel important and the world's financial institutions that saw all the red flags but decided to keep doing business anyway because of lucrative kickbacks it received. All the crows going after Malaysia's money. This was disaster that could've been stopped at many junctures. This book should be a case study for every criminal investigators and anti money laundering experts. I'm really sad my country had to be the football to be kicked around like a game. Even though we have a new govt, our great grandchildren will still be paying for the world's greatest con.

excellent book. written so well. very descriptive on all the details. no wonder it took so long to research before writing it. unbelievable what these guys did. I cant beleive the greed, not just by the main people but also the PM wife.

Worst book ever. Written with evil intention. Don't get cheated by all these lies in it.

About the author

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.