The 18 Greatest Forbes Stories Of The Decade – Forbes

Forbes reporters and our extended network of expert contributors produced more than 500,000 stories in the 2010s, inspiring and informing at scale so that we leave the decade as one of the largest and most trusted news sources in the world. Among all that journalism, several hundred pieces legitimately moved markets and dominated news cycles. And among those, a few dozen already stand out as classics.

Curating the best of the best wasnt easythere were a solid 50 stories on the short list. While I have the familiarity that comes with having a direct hand in almost all of them, I consulted several colleagues for balance, feedback and perspective. In the end, every story below shared two traits: impact (several created change and won awards, and they averaged 850,000 online readers) and sweeping storytellingcreating a future road map for historians of the 2010s.

Without further ado, in chronological order:

By Andy Greenberg | November 2010

Until Greenberg got him to sit for a Forbes cover story in 2010, Julian Assange was not on the mainstream radar. He would spend most of the decade a wanted man, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The forces he unleashed with WikiLeaks set in motion the kind of disruption and destabilization that previous generations of anarchists could only have dreamed of. Mission accomplished.

By Steven Bertoni | September 2011

The first time I met Sean Parker, he thanked me. Why? Bertonis profile is far from a valentine, revealing the polymath in all his warts and quirks. But before that, the world knew him only as depicted by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, a portrayal that even Mark Zuckerberg admitted did factual injustice to Parker. This is the first story I edited upon my return to Forbes and proved to be the prototype for dozens of definitive profiles of the decades great innovators (enough to merit a book).

By Victoria Barret | March 2012

Among all the entitled Silicon Valley bros, Barret found an Iranian immigrant who got into the tech game by selling rugs to tech honchos and wound up with a $50 million fortune. If someone has suggested this as a plot for HBOs Silicon Valley, it would have been rejected as too farcical.

By Richard Behar | June 2012

Its hard enough to do a story on an American oil company and its partners in the Russian mob, who were running roughshod over an entire region. Its another thing to get the central character on the phone (Alexey Veiman, mob nickname: The One Who Wears Glasses) to chat. Behar is a great reporter, and this story, a finalist for the Loeb Awards (the Pulitzers of business journalism), made a difference: within a day of our story publishing, Veiman was fired. In less than a year, Hess had sold off its Russian business entirely.

"That list is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature," said one of the prince's former lieutenants. "It's a very big thing for him."

By Kerry A. Dolan | March 2013

Dolan, who leads our Wealth Team, noticed a curious pattern: The stock price of Prince Alwaleeds Kingdom Holdings always seemed to spike right before Forbes calculated its annual Billionaires list. By proving that wasnt a coincidence and unraveling an all-time case of narcissism, Dolan won the Overseas Press Club Award for best international business reporting in a magazine.

By Kerry A. Dolan and Rafael Marques de Morais | August 2013

When Forbes confirmed Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of the longtime Angolan president, as Africas first woman billionaire, her homeland took it as a point of pride, disseminating the news as a point of national pride. In reality, Dos Santos represents a blueprint for how to loot a country, which Dolan and local reporter Marques de Moraiswho has been jailed while trying to get the truth out about Angolareveal in painstaking detail. This story won the Gerald Loeb Award for foreign reporting.

By Andy Greenberg | August 2013

Bitcoin, the Dark Web and drug sales. In the middle of the decade, it was entirely plausible to create a sophisticated drug-dealing exchange, helmed by someone known to no one (in terms of actual identity) and at the same time known to all (with a wink to Princess Bride fans) as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Incredibly, Greenberg got the Silk Road mastermind (two months later identified as Ross Ulbricht and now facing a double life sentence) to share his story, at the same time demonstrating the emerging power of the anonymous Web.

By Steven Bertoni and Caleb Melby | September 2013

Its not the most urgent story we ran this decade. But this profile of Stewart Stewie Rah Rah Rahr is surely our most entertaining and one of the most telling, a cautionary tale of what happens when someone comes into unlimited money, with little moral compass to go with it. Its a party that turns into a train wreckcomplete with guns, sex tapes and a cameo from Donald Trump.

"There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this," Evan Spiege said in 2014. "I think trading that for some short-term gain isn't very interesting."

By J.J. Colao | January 2014

That a 23-year-old turns down a $3 billion offer is pretty much the perfect story for the 2010s. Even better: Snapchats Evan Spiegel has proven right so far, with a public company worth $21.8 billion. This piece defines a decade ruled by young entrepreneurs, But maturity issues still crop up. After this story came out, Spiegel took to Twitter to deny a key, cocky detail, sharing an exchanged email that seemed to back him up. But then Colao produced an audiotape confirming Spiegels smack talk, and the second half of the email, which Spiegel had clipped, undermined his denial.

By Parmy Olson | February 2014

After Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant who came to America with his mother, agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, he took the contract to the welfare office where he once collected food stamps, signed it on the doorand WhatsAppd the picture to Forbes. Koum almost never talks publicly. Olson spent 18 months getting him to share his story with our readers. Its arguably the greatest rags-to-riches saga in American history, told with verve and color within hours of the deals announcement.

Donald Trump in his Trump Organization headquarters in Manhattan.

By Randall Lane | September 2015

While the rest of the world has spent four years learning about Donald Trumps tenuous relationship with the truth, Forbes has experienced this for decades. The president, more than any American tycoon, has held a multi-decade obsession with his place on The Forbes 400. Spending nearly two hours with him in 2015 as he geared up for his quixotic, historic run for the White House (watch for the appearance by the pope) allowed me to unspool an untold history of exaggerations, charms and lies that emerges as a prescient prism.

By Matt Drange and Ryan Mac | June 2016

Who was behind the mysterious money funding the wrestler Hulk Hogans legal trench warfare against the soon-to-be-defunct gossip site Gawker, and why? Mac and Drange scored one of the big business scoops of the decade by revealing that it was none other than Peter Thiel, whod made billions through PayPal, Facebook and Palantirand harbored a fatal vendetta. A real-life whodunnit.

By Matthew Herper and Michela Tindera | October 2016

John Kapoor built a $2.1 billion fortune from the opioid fentanyl, which was hailed by markets and some doctors as a wonder drug. Thats before Herper and Tindera exposed how Kapoor pushed the legal and ethical limits to get the drug into the systems of people who didnt need it. Three years later, he was convicted of racketeering.

"It's hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared's role in the campaign," said billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. "If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer."

By Steven Bertoni | November 2016

After Donald Trump shocked the world on Election Day, there was a land grab for credit. Over the next few days, Jared Kushner sat down with Forbes and discussed his role in the Trump campaign for the first time, revealing the secret data operation run with Brad Parscale that proved the difference-maker. Its a story that been cited constantly over the past four yearsthe Cambridge Analytica profiling, the gaming of Facebook and Russias efforts to influence the election all started with Kushners revelations regarding his war room.

By Dan Alexander | June 2017

In a masterpiece of reporting, Alexander systemically demonstrates how Eric Trump, at the direction of his father, the future president, shifted money that was supposed to go to help kids with cancer to the Trump Organization. Following this story, New Yorks attorney general announced an investigation, and Alexanders work won a Deadline Club award for best business feature.

By Dan Alexander | November 2017

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has outlasted pretty much every cabinet secretary in the Trump Administrationdespite (or maybe because?) Forbes caught him in an outright lie. Follow-up stories also showed a disturbing pattern of deceit, conflicts of interest and alleged theft.

"Social media is an amazing platform," Jenner said. "I have such easy access to my fans and my customers."

By Natalie Robehmed | July 2018

After this story came out, the world spent the better part of a week arguing over what it means to be self-made. We were even trolled by Dictionary.com. As easy as it is to mock the greater Kardashian plan, Kylies path to becoming the youngest ever self-made billionaire (as confirmed eight months later) perfectly illustrates how fame and followers can now be directly monetized at scale.

By Angel Au-Yeung | July 2019

Bumblehas changed the way people date and mate by empowering women to make the first move and give them a safer environment. How ironic then that Au-Yeung uncovered a pattern of tax avoidanceand misogynyat the headquarters ofBumbles corporate engine, overseen byBumbles majority owner, Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev. An instant classic amid the #MeToo Movement, and like all the best stories, it produced results: Four months after Au-Yeungs story, Andreev sold his stake in Bumble to Blackstone.

The incredible American sagas of Sara Blakely and Shahid Khan. Early deep dives into Instagrams Kevin Systrom, Spotifys Daniel Ek, Oculus Palmer Luckey and Minecrafts Markus Persson. The culture issues at Papa Johns. The rise of the liberal arts degree in techand the fall of Aubrey McClendon. The emergence of the sharing economy, as seen through Airbnb, and the emergence of big data as Big Brother, via Palantir.

And so many moreenough to excite me about the stories to be told by Forbes in the 2020s.

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The 18 Greatest Forbes Stories Of The Decade - Forbes