Bethany McLean
Bethany McLean is a highly respected business journalist, author, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, widely recognized for her investigative reporting on some of the biggest financial scandals in history. She is also a columnist at Yahoo! Finance and a frequent contributor to Business Insider and CNBC. Previously, McLean spent 13 years as Editor-at-Large at Fortune, where she and fellow journalist Peter Elkind broke the Enron scandal, one of the most infamous corporate frauds in U.S. history. Over her career, she has produced in-depth reporting on credit rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, President Bill Clinton’s global philanthropy, and Australia’s Macquarie Bank, among others. Earlier in her career, McLean was a business columnist at Slate and an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, giving her unique insight into Wall Street and corporate finance. She is also the co-author of multiple bestselling books, including The Smartest Guys in the Room (with Peter Elkind), which chronicled the rise and fall of Enron, and All the Devils Are Here (with Joe Nocera), which examined the roots of the 2008 financial crisis.
Bethany McLean Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Contributing Editor
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Editor at Large
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Investment Banking Analyst
Academic History
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B.A., English and Mathematics
CURRENT AFFILIATIONS
Contributor, Business Insider
Bethany McLean was one of the first journalists to question Enron’s soaring valuation with her landmark Fortune article, “Is Enron Overpriced?”.
Working with senior writer Peter Elkind, she uncovered irregularities in Enron’s publicly available financial documents and suggested that its record-high stock price was unjustified.
Their investigative work exposed the depth of the company’s deception and culminated in the bestselling book The Smartest Guys in the Room, which became the definitive account of Enron’s meteoric rise and catastrophic collapse.
The book was later adapted into the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which earned an Academy Award nomination in 2006.
RECOGNITION
2024 SABEW's Distinguished Achievement Award
MEDIA & PUBLICATIONS
Beyond Vanity Fair, McLean has contributed to The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New York Times op-ed page, and is a regular guest on CNBC.
She co-hosts the acclaimed podcast Capitalisn’t with University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales, where they explore capitalism’s successes and failures.
Her 2016 Vanity Fair exposé on pharmaceutical company Valeant inspired a Netflix Dirty Money episode.
McLean is also the author of two mini-books—Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants and Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World.
More recently, she has published analysis on high-profile corporate stories including Tesla, Wells Fargo, and the U.S. shale gas revolution.