Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich (born February 7, 1969, in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American author of nonfiction narrative thrillers, most of which dramatize true stories of underdog risk-takers — card counters, Silicon Valley founders, oil traders, biotech entrepreneurs, and amateur stock pickers — operating inside high-stakes financial or scientific systems. A 1991 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Mezrich wrote nine commercially unsuccessful science-fiction and techno-thriller novels under his own name and the pseudonym Holden Scott before pivoting in 2002 to the narrative-nonfiction style that would define his career. That breakthrough was "Bringing Down the House" (2002), an account of the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of students and recent graduates who used card-counting techniques to win millions from Las Vegas casinos in the 1990s. The book spent over sixty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted by Columbia Pictures as the 2008 film "21". Mezrich followed it with "Ugly Americans" (2004), about an American trader inside the Japanese arbitrage scene, and "Rigged" (2007), the New York Mercantile Exchange story of John D'Agostino's role in launching the Dubai Mercantile Exchange. His best-known title, "The Accidental Billionaires" (2009), reconstructed the founding of Facebook from the perspective of co-founder Eduardo Saverin and was the basis for Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-winning screenplay for "The Social Network" (2010). Subsequent books have covered the Winklevoss twins' post-Facebook cryptocurrency turn ("Bitcoin Billionaires", 2019), the Russian discovery of a frozen woolly mammoth ("Woolly", 2017), the GameStop short squeeze ("The Antisocial Network", 2021), and the SpaceX commercial spaceflight era ("Liftoff"). Mezrich's nonfiction technique reconstructs dialogue and interior scenes from extensive interviews and disclosed source material, a method that has drawn both critical interest and debate. He lives in Boston with his family.