# Randall Lane (journalist)

Randall Lane (born 1968) is an American journalist and author who serves as the chief content officer and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine. In 2011, Lane created the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Lane is a former editor-at-large for both Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

## Early life

While attending Briarcliff High School in 1985, Lane wrote an article for the New York Times detailing his ordeal of getting tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert. He served as co-editor of his high school's newspaper during this time.

## Career

Lane edited his college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania before interning with The Wall Street Journal. Lane received the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s top non-fiction prize for a 1988 profile he wrote on former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo.
After leaving college, he was hired as a fact checker for Forbes, and thereafter was promoted to be a staff writer. In 1995, when he was 27, he was promoted to Washington Bureau Chief, before leaving to edit three publications, P.O.V., Trader Monthly, and Dealmaker.
He founded P.O.V. with a Forbes colleague and the publication was considered by AdWeek as its start-up of the year in 1998.
At Trader Monthly, a bimonthly lifestyle magazine where Lane was the editor-in-chief, Lane created a 30 Under 30 list featuring what his magazine considered the 30 best financial traders at the time.

### 2010s

When Lane rejoined Forbes in 2011, he created the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list of up and coming figures in multiple business sectors. He then partnered with Warren Buffett to create the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, which he and Buffett have co-chaired for more than a decade.
Lane wrote a book titled The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane. In the book, Lane laid out similarities of some Wall Street traders and Major League Baseball players in their views on the ethics of cheating. He interviewed Lenny Dykstra, about his use of steroids while playing with the New York Mets, for the book. The New York Daily News stated of the book that "Lane does a terrific job ... putting things in context". In a review for Inc, Jack Covert stated "What Michael Lewis did for ’80s traders in Liar’s Poker, Randall Lane has now done for trader rock stars of The Zeroes."
Lane was responsible for the reorganization of Forbes' contributor network. The restructure saw it shift from a model where most writers volunteered their time to an all-paid platform with a guaranteed minimum pay.

### 2020s

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lane took part in a multi-part virtual innovation summit hosted by the University of Waterloo. In 2020, The New York Times identified him as one of the 922 most powerful people in the United States of America. Lane won an Emmy award as executive producer of the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn.

## Personal life

Lane was born in 1968. He is divorced and has two daughters, Sabrina and Chloe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized and hosted a four-week summer camp for his daughters and their friends, hiring teachers out of work due to the pandemic to instruct them in core subjects.

### Kanye West incident

On September 16, 2020, Lane was doxxed in a Twitter rant by American musician Kanye West. West tweeted a screenshot of a phone number labeled "Randall Forbes" and wrote "if any of my fans want to call a white supremacist... this is the editor of Forbes". Twitter deleted West's tweet after 30 minutes and suspended his account for violating Twitter's private information policy. Lane had previously interviewed West about his 2020 presidential ambitions which Forbes published in July 2020.