After a decade as a Forbes senior editor, Zack O’Malley Greenburg now writes exclusively at Substack, where he’s serializing his fifth book, We Are All Musicians Now (sign up here). His other books include Jay-Z biography Empire State of Mind (re-released by Penguin in 2021) and A-List Angels: How a Band of Actors, Artists and Athletes Hacked Silicon Valley (published in 2020 by Little, Brown). Zack has also written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Vibe, Sports Illustrated, McSweeney's and the Library of Congress; he's been a source for BBC, NPR, and 60 Minutes, and a speaker at SXSW, CES, TEDx, Princeton and Harvard.
Zack played the title role in the 1992 film Lorenzo's Oil; he started his writing career at age 14 as video game reviewer for Boys’ Life. In 2007, he graduated Yale with an American Studies degree and joined Forbes, where he went on to pen over 1,000 stories, including a dozen-plus covers on subjects from Kanye West to Richard Branson to Katy Perry. He has reported on everything from hedge fund schemes to Wu-Tang Clan's secret album, pioneering Forbes’ hip-hop coverage and helping launch the 30 Under 30 franchise along the way. Zack lives in New York with his wife and cats.
