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 wasn’t easy–there 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 storytelling—creating a future road map for historians of the 2010s.
Without further ado, in chronological order:
The World Meets Julian Assange
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.
A Caricature Comes Alive
By Steven Bertoni | September 2011
The first time I met Sean Parker, he thanked me. Why? Bertoni’s 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 decade’s great innovators (enough to merit a book).
Silicon Valley’s Cinderella
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 HBO’s Silicon Valley, it would have been rejected as too farcical.
Hess Oil’s Russian Mob Problem
By Richard Behar | June 2012
It’s 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. It’s 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."
Ben Baker-Redux for ForbesThe Curious Case of Prince Alwaleed
By Kerry A. Dolan | March 2013
Dolan, who leads our Wealth Team, noticed a curious pattern: The stock price of Prince Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holdings always seemed to spike right before Forbes calculated its annual Billionaires list. By proving that wasn’t 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.
How to Loot a Country
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 Africa’s 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 Morais—who has been jailed while trying to get the truth out about Angola—reveal in painstaking detail. This story won the Gerald Loeb Award for foreign reporting.
The Dread Pirate Roberts
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.
The Number One King of All Fun
By Steven Bertoni and Caleb Melby | September 2013
It’s 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. It’s a party that turns into a train wreck—complete 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."
Michael GreccoEvan Spiegel’s $3 Billion Bet
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: Snapchat’s 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 Spiegel’s smack talk, and the second half of the email, which Spiegel had clipped, undermined his denial.
The American Dream Incarnate
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 door—and “WhatsApp’d” the picture to Forbes. Koum almost never talks publicly. Olson spent 18 months getting him to share his story with our readers. It’s arguably the greatest rags-to-riches saga in American history, told with verve and color within hours of the deal’s announcement.
Donald Trump in his Trump Organization headquarters in Manhattan.
Jamel ToppinDonald Trump’s Epic 30-Year Fantasy
By Randall Lane | September 2015
While the rest of the world has spent four years learning about Donald Trump’s 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.
Peter Thiel’s War on Gawker
By Matt Drange and Ryan Mac | June 2016
Who was behind the mysterious money funding the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s 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, who’d made billions through PayPal, Facebook and Palantir—and harbored a fatal vendetta. A real-life whodunnit.
John Kapoor’s Opioid Ring
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. That’s before Herper and Tindera exposed how Kapoor pushed the legal and ethical limits to get the drug into the systems of people who didn’t 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."
Jamel Toppin/The Forbes CollectionJared Kushner’s Secret War Room
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. It’s a story that been cited constantly over the past four years–the Cambridge Analytica profiling, the gaming of Facebook and Russia’s efforts to influence the election all started with Kushner’s revelations regarding his war room.
Eric Trump’s Uncharitable Charity
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 York’s attorney general announced an investigation, and Alexander’s work won a Deadline Club award for best business feature.
Wilbur Ross’ Web of Lies
By Dan Alexander | November 2017
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has outlasted pretty much every cabinet secretary in the Trump Administration–despite (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."
Jamel Toppin for ForbesKylie Jenner … Billionaire
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, Kylie’s 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.
Sex, Drugs and Misogyny at Bumble Owner's HQ
By Angel Au-Yeung | July 2019
Bumble has 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 avoidance—and misogyny—at the headquarters of Bumble’s corporate engine, overseen by Bumble’s 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-Yeung’s story, Andreev sold his stake in Bumble to Blackstone.
... And Some Honorable Mentions
The incredible American sagas of Sara Blakely and Shahid Khan. Early deep dives into Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Oculus’ Palmer Luckey and Minecraft’s Markus Persson. The culture issues at Papa John’s. The rise of the liberal arts degree in tech—and 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 more—enough to excite me about the stories to be told by Forbes in the 2020s.