Longtime staff writer of The New Yorker and author of 12 books, including five national bestsellers, Ken Auletta is “the James Bond of the media world,” as BusinessWeek put it. In ranking him as America’s premier media commentator, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “No other reporter has covered the news communication business as thoroughly.” In his award-winning Annals of Communications, Auletta chronicled major events and explores the powerful people shaping the Internet, social media, television, Hollywood, newspaper, publishing, and tech industries. Drawing from his investigative work, Auletta speaks on the future of media and communication, and the disruption it brings to our lives. With his high-profile interviews and incisive commentary, Auletta provides a roadmap for where society has been and where it’s going.  

Auletta's profiles have revealed with unique intimacy the inner workings of such famous media personalities as Rupert Murdoch, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Harvey Weinstein, Barry Diller, the editors and publisher of The New York Times, and Bill Gates. His profile of Ted Turner, “The Lost Tycoon,” won a National Magazine Award as the Year’s Best Profile.

Auletta's 13th book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and The Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022. He explores Weinstein's entire life and the talent that produced acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love. Auletta, who attended Weinstein’s criminal trial daily, seeks to unravel the mystery of what made this mogul such a sexual beast and digs into the complicity of a culture of silence that enabled Weinstein to evade disclosure for four decades.

For Auletta's book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), he decided to “Follow the money” of the advertising and marketing industry, and report on the many newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations – as well as digital enterprises it supports. Frenemies was called “a bright, informative take on an industry in turmoil” in its Kirkus Review. 

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by BusinessWeek. His other national bestsellers include Greed and Glory on Wall Street, named one of the “Best books about Wall Street” by Yahoo Finance; Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway; and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies.

Auletta’s ability to be welcomed in rarely visited sanctums has allowed him to take readers into a judge’s chambers during the Microsoft Trial, a Murdoch and John Malone business summit negotiation, Viacom board meetings, and New York Times front-page deliberations, and White House communications team meetings. The stunning interviews he conducted with the federal judge who presided over the Microsoft Antitrust Case were cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals to reverse the judge’s decision.

For his interview with Elizabeth Holmes, Auletta was featured in Alex Gibney's documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the rise and fall of Theranos, the multi-billion dollar healthcare company. 

Auletta has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, been named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, for four decades has served as a National Judge of the Annual Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, served twice on the board PEN, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was selected one of the 20th century’s top 100 business journalists by a distinguished panel of his peers.