Corporate Scandals

Rising star New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political, social, and financial fallout.The billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become inextricable from the social media platform that until 2023 was known as Twitter. Started in the mid-2000s as a playful microblogging platform, Twitter quickly became a vital nexus of global politics, culture, and media—where the retweet button could instantly catapult any idea to hundreds of millions of screens around the world, unleashing raw collective emotion like nothing else before. While its founder had idealistically dreamed of building a "digital town square," he detested Wall Street and never focused on building a profitable business.Musk joined the platform in 2010 and, by 2022, had become one of the site’s most influential users, amassing over 80 million followers with a mix of provocations, promotion of his companies, and attacks on his enemies. To Musk, Twitter—once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech—had badly lost its way. He blamed it for the proliferation of what he called the “woke mind virus” and claimed that the survival of democracy and the human race itself depended on the future of the site.In January 2022, Musk began secretly accumulating Twitter stock. By April he was its largest shareholder, and soon after he made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company for the sum of $44 billion. Backed into a corner, Twitter’s board accepted his offer—but Musk quickly changed his mind, forcing Twitter to sue him to close the deal in October.The richest man on earth controlled one of the most powerful media platforms in the world—but at what price? Before long Twitter would be gone for good, replaced by something radically different, as Musk remade the company in his own image from the ground up.The story of the showdown between Musk and Twitter and his eventual takeover of the company is unlike anything in business or media that has come before. In vivid, cinematic detail, Conger and Mac follow the inner workings of the company as Musk lays siege to it, first from the outside as one of its most vocal users, and then finally from within as a contentious and mercurial leader. Musk has shared some of his version of events, but Conger and Mac have uncovered the full story through exclusive interviews, unreported documents, and internal recordings at Twitter following the billionaire’s takeover. With unparalleled sources from within and around the company, they provide a revelatory, three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk showed up, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers.This is the defining story of our time told with uncommon style and peerless rigor. In a world of viral ideas and emotion, who gets to control the narrative, who gets to be heard, and what does power really cost?

Christened a potential savior of Silicon Valley's startup culture, Adam Neumann was set to take WeWork, his office-sharing company disrupting the commercial real estate market, public, cash out on the company's forty-seven-billion-dollar valuation, and break the string of major startups unable to deliver to shareholders. But as employees knew, and investors soon found out, WeWork's capital was built on promises that the company was more than a real estate purveyor, that in fact it was a transformational technology company.Veteran journalist Reeves Wiedeman dives deep into WeWork and its CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana- and tequila-filled boardrooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism.EndorsementsA Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller“This vivid inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious and improbable rises and falls in American business history.” — Ken Auletta“Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel.” — Ken Auletta

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis.The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions — Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis — an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality.Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.EndorsementsWinner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionShortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year AwardOne of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021‘Jaw-dropping... Beggars belief’ — Sunday Times‘You feel almost guilty for enjoying it so much’ — The Times

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor—the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide—was set daily by a small group of easily manipulated administrators, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it fractions of a percent to suit their trading portfolios. Tom Hayes, a brilliant but troubled mathematician, became the lynchpin of a wild alliance that included a prickly French trader nicknamed “Gollum”; the broker “Abbo,” who liked to publicly strip naked when drinking; a nervous Kazakh chicken farmer known as “Derka Derka”; a broker known as “Village” (short for “Village Idiot”) who racked up huge expense account bills; an executive called “Clumpy” because of his patchwork hair loss; and a broker uncreatively nicknamed “Big Nose” who had once been a semi-professional boxer. This group generated incredible riches — until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.With exclusive access to key characters and evidence, The Spider Network is a rollicking account of the scam and a provocative examination of a financial system that was crooked throughout.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.

The Enron scandal brought down one of the most admired companies of the 1990s. Countless books and articles were written about it, but only The Smartest Guys in the Room holds up a decade later as the definitive narrative. McLean and Elkind reveal the fates of the key players in the scandal.

Billion Dollar Whale reveals 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.EndorsementsNamed a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times.Named a Best Book of 2018 by Fortune.“Thrilling.” — Bill Gates.New York Times bestseller.“An epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review).“The heist of the century.” — Axios.

The definitive, shocking account of the FIFA scandal—the biggest corruption case of recent years—involving dozens of countries and implicating nearly every aspect of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, including the World Cup.The FIFA case began small, boosted by an IRS agent’s review of an American soccer official’s tax returns. But that humble investigation eventually led to a huge worldwide corruption scandal that crossed continents and reached the highest levels of the sport’s world governing body in Switzerland.Ken Bensinger’s Red Card explores the case, and the personalities behind it, in vivid detail. There’s Chuck Blazer, a high-living soccer dad who ascended to the highest ranks of the sport while skimming millions from its coffers; Jack Warner, a Trinidadian soccer official whose lust for power was matched only by his boundless greed; and the sport’s most powerful man, FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who held on to his position at any cost even as soccer rotted from the inside out.Remarkably, this corruption existed for decades before American law enforcement officials began to secretly dig, finally revealing that nearly every aspect of the planet’s favorite sport was corrupted by bribes, kickbacks, fraud, and money laundering. Not even the World Cup, the most-watched sporting event in history, was safe from the thick web of corruption, as powerful FIFA officials extracted their bribes at every turn. Red Card goes beyond the headlines to bring the real story to light.Endorsements“An engrossing and jaw-dropping tale of international intrigue… A riveting book.” — The New York Times“The meeting of American investigative reporting and real-life cop show.” — The Financial Times“A gripping white-collar crime thriller that, in its scope and human drama, ranks with some of the best investigative business books of the past thirty years.” — The Wall Street Journal

How do super-rich bankers get away with it?There is a powerful new class of billionaire financiers in the world who use their phenomenal wealth to write their own rules and laws. Chief among them is Steven Cohen, a Wall Street legend and the basis for Damian Lewis's character in Billions, who built his hedge fund into a $15 billion empire on the basis of wizard-like stock trading and who flies to work by helicopter and owns one of the largest private art collections in the world.But his iconic status was shattered when his fund became the target of a sprawling FBI investigation into insider trading, charged with using illegal inside information — or 'black edge' — to beat the market.His firm, SAC Capital, was ultimately indicted and pled guilty to charges of securities and wire fraud, and paid record criminal and civil fines of nearly $2 billion. But even as the company bearing his name pled guilty, Cohen himself was never charged and is free to start trading publicly again from January 2018.Black Edge offers a revelatory look at the grey zone in which so much of Wall Street functions, and a window into the transformation of the worldwide economy. With meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, this is a riveting, true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the US government's pursuit of Cohen and his employees, and raises urgent questions about the power and wealth of those who sit at the pinnacle of the financial world.EndorsementsNominated for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year.Nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.Amazon Top 5 Business Books of 2017.'A prodigious feat of reporting.' — Malcolm Gladwell'Black Edge has the grip of a thriller... Everyone should read this book.' — David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of Z

In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.The Silk Road quickly ballooned into a $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it.EndorsementsVanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author — Nick Bilton

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the news-breaking New York Times journalist, delivers the first true in-the-room account of the most powerful men and women at the eye of the financial storm — from reviled Lehman Brothers CEO Dick 'the gorilla' Fuld, to banking whiz Jamie Dimon, from bullish Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to AIG's Joseph Cassano, dubbed 'The Man Who Crashed the World'.Through unprecedented access to the key players, Sorkin meticulously re-creates frantic phone calls, foul-mouthed rows and white-knuckle panic, as Wall Street fought to save itself.They were masters of the financial universe, flying in private jets and raking in billions. They thought they were too big to fail. Yet they would bring the world to its knees.EndorsementsShortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2010

Who is Bernie Madoff, and how did he pull off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history?This question has long fascinated people: the New York financier who swindled his friends, relatives, and other investors out of $65 billion. And in The Wizard of Lies, Diana B. Henriques of The New York Times has written the definitive account of the man and his scheme, drawing on unprecedented access and more than one hundred interviews, including Madoff’s first interviews for publication following his arrest. Henriques provides vivid details from the lawsuits and government investigations that explode the myths that have come to surround the story.A true-life financial thriller—and now a major HBO film starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer—The Wizard of Lies contrasts Madoff’s remarkable rise on Wall Street with dramatic scenes from his accelerating slide toward self-destruction. It is also the most complete account of the heartbreaking personal disasters and landmark legal battles triggered by Madoff’s downfall—the suicides, business failures, fractured families, shuttered charities—and the clear lessons this timeless scandal offers to Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street.

"Like most other young business school graduates, John Rolfe and Peter Troob thought that life in a major investment banking firm would make their wildest dreams come true — it would be fast-paced, intellectually challenging, glamorous, and, best of all, lucrative.They were in for a surprise. For behind the walls of Wall Street's firms lies a stratum of stunted, overworked, abused, and, in the end, very well-compensated but very frustrated men and women. Monkey Business takes readers behind the scenes at Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette (DLJ), one of Wall Street's hottest firms of the 90s, from the interview process to the courting of clients to bonus time. It's a glimpse of a side of the business the financial periodicals don't talk about — 20-hour work days, trips across the country where associates do nothing except carry the pitch book, strip clubs at night, inflated salaries, and high-powered, unforgettable personalities.Monkey Business provides readers with a first-class education in the real life of an investment banker. But best of all, it is an extremely funny read about two young men who, on their way towards achieving the American dream, quickly realized they were selling their souls to get there."Animal House meets Liar's Poker in this hysterically funny, often unbelievable, and absolutely, positively true account of life at DLJ, one of the hottest investment banks on Wall Street.

The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor. Out of a handful of unlikely — really unlikely — heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.EndorsementsThe #1 New York Times bestseller."It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it's essential reading." — Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair