We have a very exclusive and scoop-heavy edition of La Fronde today!

First, I’ve got an exclusive about legendary business journalist Bethany McLean’s new gig as Inc.’s first chief financial correspondent. Then, in Seen and Heard, I have a few scoops including a very fun new indie women’s mag focused on intentional living and a new women-led travel outlet that you can only get by snail mail. Plus, Hillary Clinton teams up with Kara Swisher on a new podcast, several prominent climate journalists join forces for a new reporting collab, and more news.

And, as always, we’ve got our Tuesday On the Move list with the latest media job announcements, including a big one from New York Public Radio’s CEO, and another reader hot take in I Said What I Said.

xoxo,

Stephanie

Inc. just made a major hiring move with the appointment of Bethany McLean as its first chief financial correspondent — and it’s a huge win for the magazine. 

Bethany is one of the most esteemed business journalists in the game right now. Her landmark 2001 Fortune story ‘Is Enron Overpriced?’ was integral to exposing the energy giant’s dubious accounting practices. The company filed for bankruptcy later that year, setting off one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. She went on to co-write the best-selling book ‘The Smartest Guys in the Room’ — which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated documentary — and spent years as a contributing editor at outlets like Vanity Fair. Her skeptical eye on the finance world feels especially valuable at a time when there are so many unanswered questions about the economy.

Companies that once would have raced to an IPO are staying private longer and raising cash in ways most of us never see. This shift is rapidly changing how they grow, who gets rich and who’s left holding the bag. Bethany’s investigative chops will help Inc. readers make sense of what’s going on behind the scenes and uncover stories that otherwise would never see the light of day. 

I talked with Bethany about her new gig at Inc., why the AI boom feels more ominous than the dot-com era, the Enron story that made her name and more.

Congratulations on your new role! Have you started yet?

Sort of, because I wrote two pieces for Inc. in the last year. I wrote one on Oracle when I originally connected with them, and then I wrote another one on the private credit boom, and I’m just finishing a third piece. So I actually feel like I’ve been there for a while at this point. It doesn’t feel as new.

Why did you feel like this was the right moment to take on something new? 

I’ve really enjoyed the pieces I’ve done with Inc. I’ve really enjoyed working with the people there. The editing is really thoughtful, and the people are great. And my old colleague from Fortune from many years ago, Stephanie Mehta, plays a role at Mansueto [Ventures, the publisher of Inc. and Fast Company], so I feel like I know people there. I’ve been looking for a place where I could play more of a role, moderating at events, doing online pieces, as well as writing for a magazine. Inc. really does all of that at once, and I think they do a really great job of creating and fostering a community of people.

What do you think the general public doesn't realize about how much economic power sits outside the public markets?

I’m just finishing a piece right now that is about this very topic, and I think it is stunning how much money has gravitated toward the private markets. I think people are vaguely aware that the number of IPOs has fallen and the number of publicly traded companies has fallen, but I don’t think people are as aware of how much money there is in private markets. And I think there are good things and dangerous things about it. I think it’s great that companies — including some of the companies Inc. writes about — have options for how they finance themselves. The old world used to be IPO or bust, and now you can continue to stay private for much longer.

But I think there are risks to this, too. One thing that really surprised me as I wrote this piece that will be published soon is that prices are actually higher in the final late stages of private markets than public markets can often support. So there’s a little bit of an argument that private markets are out of control, and we won’t really know until it ends. In private markets for company financing — we used to think of it as venture capital, but this is very late-stage venture capital — it’s driven more, as one person said to me, by FOMO than it is necessarily by strict valuation metrics. And that makes a lot of sense, because old-school venture capitalists invested in people and ideas and concepts. They didn’t invest on the nitty-gritty of the numbers. But now that they’re doing much later-stage investing, there’s an argument that maybe the nitty-gritty of the numbers matters a little more. Maybe it doesn’t. Certainly, they’ve been right so far, and a skeptic would have been wrong.

And the same is obviously true of private credit markets, where there is an argument: How great, there are so many more options for a company to finance itself now than there used to be. And then there’s an argument: Hmm, but what’s going on in the shadows that we can’t see? I love phenomena like this that have potentially both a really good side and a bad side, and maybe all of them at once.

This was also the case with your Enron story — you uncovered some of what was happening behind the scenes before people really caught on. I’m curious: After that story was published, did that change how you scrutinized companies? 

That’s a really interesting question. I think I had already become a little bit skeptical of the official narrative of a company before that. I had seen enough during the years I’d been at Fortune, and been pitched enough stories where I believed the pitch I was given and wrote the pitch up, and then watched in horror as the whole thing turned out to be not exactly the story I had been sold. So I was already aware that the official story and the real story might be very different.

I think it made me a lot more skeptical of our supposed gatekeepers — the accountants and the rating agencies and the Wall Street banks and a company’s board of directors, all of whom I would have thought before this were these august entities that would make sure the world was good and fair for everybody. I no longer have that view. More broadly, the whole Enron story just made me much more interested in the human nature aspects of business than I was before, because Enron isn’t a straightforward story of fraud. It’s a story of hubris and self-delusion and rationalization, and those themes play out over and over again. They’re very human and almost Shakespearean in a way. When something goes badly wrong, it’s very rarely as simple as someone setting out to do bad things. So I’m always interested in that aspect of stories, even the ones that are train wrecks in the end.

You’ve investigated plenty of powerful CEOs over the years. What’s the most surprising reaction you’ve gotten from a source or company after a story was published?

One of the reasons I’ve always liked and respected [JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon so much is that he is one of the few CEOs out there — in fact, the only one I’ve ever encountered in my years of writing about business — who, after a piece runs, will pick up the phone and call the journalist himself, not his PR person. You’ll pick up a random phone call and it’s Jamie telling you what he liked and what he thinks you got right and what he thinks you got wrong. He’s extremely straightforward and candid that way, in a way that doesn’t involve the typical power dynamic, where the PR person would call you and say, “Jamie Dimon would like to get on the phone with you.” He doesn’t do that layer.

You’ve covered so many angles of business and finance at this point in your career. What gets you excited to chase a story?

I don’t think anything has really changed. Maybe that’s terrible, and I should have evolved into some grander human being. But I’m still interested in the same things I ever was. When something has happened, I’m still interested in figuring out why it happened and what led to the place where we are today. It’s like solving a complicated equation or putting a puzzle together. I still love talking to people and hearing their stories and getting to learn. I think one of the greatest privileges of being a journalist is that you have an excuse to call anybody. They may not pick up, but you have an excuse to call anybody and try to get them to talk to you.

I’m still really excited by positive stories. When something great is happening in the world, I think it’s so exciting to hear about that and celebrate it. Despite the criticisms I make of it, I’m still a believer in capitalism, and so I am excited about stories that show how capitalism can work, as well as stories that show how sometimes it doesn’t work. So I don’t actually think anything has changed. 

That was related to the next question I had: Since you reported on Enron, how has business and financial journalism evolved, for better or worse?

I think it’s both at the same time. I’m still a magazine person, and I love the model of magazines like Fortune and Vanity Fair, where you could do a big investigation for six months, and if it didn’t publish, you still had a paycheck to take home. I think that is increasingly difficult today, because most of the time, if a story doesn’t get published, you don’t get paid. I think that is an enormous disincentive to do really breaking business journalism.

At the same time, back when I wrote about Enron, finding somebody who was a skeptic of a company was itself an investigative process, because people didn’t talk on the record, and you had to know somebody to get access to that world of information. Now that’s everywhere — on Substacks, on X. If you want a contrarian take on a company, you can probably find it. And of course, it’s biased. Everybody in a market is biased. There are people who want something to go up. There are people who want it to go down. That’s the definition of a market. But you can find it. You can hear that view and make up your own mind.

And the amount of incredibly sophisticated coverage of all things financial is just incredible. It takes work to read it. One of the things you learn as a magazine journalist is that you have to be clear, and somebody like your mother has to be able to pick it up and at least have a chance of understanding what you’re writing about. And some of this stuff is clearly what we used to call inside baseball — I’m not a sports person, so forgive the sports metaphor. It’s hard to understand, but it’s there, and that’s just such a dramatic change. And I think that’s probably a good change.

With more companies deciding to stay private, does that make your job harder when it comes to digging and doing that investigative journalism?

It does, and it’ll be interesting at Inc., because that will be a new challenge. I’ve talked about that with the reporters there a little bit, because it is a huge advantage to have a publicly traded company, right? There’s a lot that is knowable about that company, and there are analysts who are covering it. It’s different in private markets, and I think that goes back to the broader theme of transparency I mentioned. You have to wonder: If increasingly so much of our financial market is behind the wall of privacy, what does that mean, not just for journalists, but for policymakers, for people who are trying to get economic data? If it’s all in the shadows, how well do markets function?

Between the AI investment boom and shifts in the IPO market, there are a lot of forces reshaping the economy right now. How do you make sense of what's happening?

I think you can’t. That’s a really great question, and if I had an answer to it — frankly, I should be running the world if I had an answer to that! I don’t think anybody knows. I think we really are in uncharted territory, because the size of the investment in AI is so big — an order of magnitude bigger than anything we’ve seen before — and it really is unclear how it’s all going to work out.

What’s very different to me about the AI boom compared with other things I’ve written about, from Enron to the financial crisis, is that in those previous stories, generally speaking, the smart money was on one side and the dumb money was on the other. In the run-up to Enron, most hedge funds that really did their work and were really skilled investors were short on Enron. The ones who owned it were the people who weren’t doing their homework. In the financial crisis — obviously, the story of ‘The Big Short’ — the smart people figured it out, whereas the investors who relied on the rating agencies and bought what the rating agencies told them to buy were the ones who got screwed. In this, some of the smartest people I know are big believers in the AI boom and that it’s all going to work out. And some of the smartest people I know are skeptics. So that tells me that no one really knows.

The big question is whether the money is there at the time the debts start to come due, and nobody knows the answer to that. Nobody knows whether AI will unleash this massive revenue opportunity or whether it will just be an incredible tool that people use. I think it will probably be the former. But even if it is the former, the pace at which that happens — when do we get to the trillions of dollars in revenue? I don’t think anybody knows that, because there are so many complicated factors at work. It’s not just the advances of AI. It’s the safety aspects of it. It’s the speed at which it can be adopted by corporations. It’s the amount of pushback from the population. I don’t think it’s knowable.

How does covering the AI boom compare with covering the dot-com boom of the late ‘90s? Does the atmosphere feel different this time?

I think there are parallels, and a lot of people have drawn them between the AI build-out and the boom in bandwidth and fiber-optic cable. It’s different because of the scale this time. And I think it’s different because so much of it has taken place in private markets, and so many people have already made so much money in a way that ordinary investors haven’t been able to participate in. So it’s been a bit more of an insider economy this time around, which changes things in a way that isn’t great at this particular moment, when capitalism is already under siege. So there’s a sourness to it too.

I think there’s a fear this time that wasn’t true of the dot-com boom. The dot-com boom looks almost innocent in retrospect, right? It was Pets.com — you could buy dog food online. It wasn’t going to wipe out humanity and destroy all of our abilities to make a living. So it’s not just the scale. It’s the very existential nature of the whole thing. And I guess I feel the fear more than I feel the excitement.

Besides articles, are you planning to leverage video or podcasts as part of your work at Inc. too?

Inc. has a podcast, and part of my deal is that I’m going to be on it — I can’t remember how many times a year — and I really enjoy that. It’s really fun. I could do without the video aspect of it. I kind of liked the days when podcasting was supposed to be about your voice, and you could sit there in your pajamas and not have to look nice.

I do a podcast now called ‘Capitalisn’t’ that looks at how capitalism is working and not working, with a guy at the University of Chicago, an economist named Luigi Zingales. That’s something I’ve done for about five years, and it is really fun. There’s obviously cooperation between the academic world and journalism, but historically we kind of look skeptically at each other. So it’s really interesting to work closely with academia.

Knowing what you know now about money, power and corporate America, what’s one thing you wish you understood then, when you were starting out as a business journalist?

I think I already had part of this, because I came out of three years of investment banking, so I had already realized that it wasn’t rocket science. I think that’s the best piece of advice I have for either a person or a journalist: You really can figure it out. It’s not that complicated at the end of the day. This is not advanced theoretical physics; business is just not that. So if you can’t figure it out, there probably is a problem. And you can figure it out if you put the time into it.

When I came out of college, there was more of a tendency to look down on business — if you were brilliant and artistic and whatever, well, you didn’t understand business. In reality, business is art. It’s passion. It’s creativity. It’s all of those things. And I think it’s really, really important to understand how business works, how markets work, how the economy works, because in the end, the economy is our society. I guess the shorter answer to your question is that I’ve grown more and more to see the economy as a critical part of our world — not this thing that sits off to the left-hand side that is only for boring people.

And I like what you said earlier about the human element of the business side as well — what you mentioned about Enron and how there were layers to the personalities of the people who were in it. I think that’s an interesting through line as well.

I wish I had also had a little more compassion for people, and I’ve definitely learned that over the years. Because even when someone is the archetypal villain at the center of a story, nobody ever visualizes themselves as that starting out. No one intended to be that. Certain people get placed in positions that prey on their preexisting weaknesses, and it’s really hard to say that any of us would do better — you’d always like to believe you would. But I think I have a lot more compassion for people than I used to.

Not all people.

Ha! You’re like — Let me just make an addendum on that.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

Scoop #1: A new women’s lifestyle mag launches. As you all know by now, I love collecting and reading indie magazines. They’re my offline refuge after spending hours glued to my screen during the week (which can send you into a funk, if I’m being real).