Ken Auletta

Critically examines the influence of Google on today's dynamic media landscape, profiling company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while offering insight into their lucrative business processes and assessing the internal and external threats that may inhibit the company's future prospects.

The End of the World as We Know it

Googled

Frenemies

A shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein rose to become a dominant figure in the world of movies, how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites, and how it all came crashing down, from the author who has covered the Hollywood power game for the New Yorker for three decades Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote one of the iconic New Yorker profiles for which he is famous, of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was then at the height of his powers. The profile created waves for exposing how volatile, even violent, Weinstein was to his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach: rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator, but no one was willing to go on the record, and in the end Auletta and the magazine concluded they couldn’t close the case. But the story always nagged at him, and many years later, he was able to share his reporting notes and all that he knew with Ronan Farrow, and to cheer him along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as all of them broke pioneering stories and wrote bestselling books. But the story continued nagging him. Farrow, Twohey, and Kantor did a brilliant job of exposing the trail of assaults and their cover-up, but the larger questions remained: what was at the root of Weinstein’s monstrousness? How and why was it never checked? How does a man run the day-to-day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever being caught, for years and years? How much is this a story about Harvey Weinstein, and how much is this a story about Hollywood and power? Ken Auletta has spent the last three years in pursuit of the answers, uncovering the mysteries beneath a film career unparalleled in Hollywood history for its combination of extraordinary business and creative success and a personal brutality and viciousness that left a trail of ruined lives in its wake. Hollywood Ending is an unflinching examination of Weinstein’s life and career. Not simply a prosecutor’s litany of crimes, it embeds them in the context of his overall business, his failures but also his outsized successes. To understand how Weinstein could behave as he did, we have to understand the power he wielded. Iconic film stars, Miramax employees and board members, old friends and family, and even the person who knew him best—Harvey’s brother Bob—all talked to Auletta at length. The result is not simply the portrait of a predator, it is a portrait of the power that allowed Weinstein to operate with such impunity for so many years, the spider web in which his victims found themselves trapped. To face the truth of the Weinstein story is to understand how many other spider webs no doubt still remain.

Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

Hollywood Ending

the epic disruption of the ad business (and everything else)

The inside account of a financial meltdown that reshaped Wall Street In 1983, Lew Glucksman, then co-CEO of the heralded investment bank Lehman Brothers, demanded the resignation of chairman Pete Peterson, with whom he had long argued over how to manage the company. Shockingly, Peterson, who had taken charge a decade earlier and led Lehman from near collapse to record profits, agreed to step down. In this meticulously researched volume, Ken Auletta details the turmoil, infighting, and power struggles that brought about Peterson’s departure and the eventual sale of one of Wall Street’s oldest and most prestigious firms. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s stock exchange, where hotshot young traders made and lost millions in a single afternoon, the story of Lehman’s fall is a suspenseful battle of wills between bankers, traders, and executives motivated by greed, envy, and ego. Auletta, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and was granted access to private company records, has crafted a thorough, enduring, and engaging account of pivotal events that continued to influence this storied financial institution until its ultimate demise in 2008.

The Fall of the House of Lehman

Greed and Glory on Wall Street

How - and why - did one of the world's greatest cities come to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy? Ken Auletta, writer for THE NEW YORKER and columnist for THE DAILY NEWS, shows how the decline of New York City was partly inevitable --- the result of shifting migration patterns and rapidl technological innovations --- and partly caused by anarchic political and economic factions, each angling for its own advantage. His lucid examination also pinpoints the core of New York City's problems --- the failure of liberal democratic government --- and explores what this will mean for the future of all American cities. "A tremendously impressive combination of reporting and analysis that illuminates not only New York's situation, but also the most basic trends in the politics and economy of the nation as a whole" - James Fallows, Washington Editor, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY "Absolute must reading for anyone concerned with New York and the urban future." - George Sternlieb, Director, Centor for Urban Policy Researcch, Rutgers University

The Streets Were Paved with Gold

The best-selling author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street presents a provocative look at the government's antitrust trial of Microsoft, the company's defeat in court, and the implications of the case for Microsoft, its rivals, and the new high-tech, Internet economy. 75,000 first printing.

Microsoft and Its Enemies

World War 3.0

In a nation where poverty and welfare rolls are declining but the underclass persists, the United States is as conflicted as ever about its responsibilities toward all its people. Thus, The Underclass is as incredibly lucid and pertinent as ever.

The Underclass

An insider's look at the world of journalism addresses the struggle between ideals and the business of news, the moral ambiguity of the "media personality" phenomenon, the impact of the Internet, and other key topics.

Inside the Business of News

Backstory

An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the bestselling author of Googled

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Advertising Industry (and Why This Matters)

What happened to network television in the 1980s? How did CBS, NBC, and ABC lose a third of their audience and more than half of their annual profits? Ken Auletta, author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street, tells the gripping story of the decline of the networks in this epically scaled work of journalism. He chronicles the takeovers and executive coups that turned ABC and NBC into assets of two mega-corporations and CBS into the fiefdom of one man, Larry Tisch, whose obsession with the bottom line could be both bracing and appalling. Auletta takes us inside the CBS newsroom on the night that Dan Rather went off-camera for six deadly minutes; into the screening rooms where NBC programming wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff watched two of his brightest prospects for new series thud disastrously to earth; and into the boardrooms where the three networks were trying to decide whether television is a public trust or a cash cow. Rich in anecdote and gossip, scalpel-sharp in its perceptions, Three Blind Mice chronicles a revolution in American business and popular culture, one that is changing the world on both sides of the television screen.

Ken Auletta

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