Bethany McLean
Bethany McLean is a renowned business journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a columnist at Yahoo! Finance and a contributor to Business Insider and CNBC. Previously, she worked for 13 years as Editor-at-Large at Fortune, where she and fellow reporter Peter Elkind exposed the Enron scandal. She has also written in-depth pieces about the credit rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, President Clinton’s global philanthropy, and Australia’s Macquarie Bank, among others. Before that, she was a business columnist at Slate and an investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs. McLean has co-authored multiple bestselling books, including The Smartest Guys in the Room with Peter Elkind and All the Devils Are Here with Joe Nocera.
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
McLean was one of the first reporters to raise questions about Enron, with her story “Is Enron Overpriced?”
She and fellow Fortune senior writer Peter Elkind exposed Enron, noticing the irregularities in Enron’s financial documents that were available to the public and suggesting the company’s then-record high stock price was unjustified.
After the company's collapse, they drew from a wide range of unique sources and provided a definitive account of Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise.
A documentary based on their book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
RECOGNITION
2024 Distinguished Achievement Award, Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW)
MEDIA & PUBLICATIONS
McLean has contributed to the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the New York Times op-ed page. She is also a regular guest on CNBC TV.
She is the co-host, along with University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales, of the podcast Capitalisn’t.
Her 2016 Vanity Fair story on disgraced pharmaceutical company Valeant was used as the basis for Netflix’s “Dirty Money” episode about the drugmaker.
She has also written two mini books, Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the US Mortgage Giants and Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World.
More recently, McLean has been covering headline corporate news such as Tesla, Wells Fargo, or the Shale gas revolution in the US.