Gary Rivlin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
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Generative AI has transformed Silicon Valley’s playing field, favoring tech giants with vast data, compute power, and capital—while leaving traditional startups struggling to keep up.
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Gary Rivlin has written long-form journalism for everyone from the New York Times Magazine to Wired to Newsweek. He’s written seven full-length books and won prestigious prizes for his journalism, including a Pulitzer.
In his twenties, he worked as a staff writer at the Chicago Reader, where he wrote primarily about local politics. This experience led to his first book, Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington and the Politics of Race, winner of the 1992 Carl Sandburg Award for best non-fiction and the Chicago Sun-Times’s non-fiction book of the year.
In the 1990s moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began writing about the youth-violence epidemic plaguing Oakland and other cities for the East Bay Express. This research led to his second book, Drive-By.
He then started writing about Silicon Valley for publications including Salon, the New Republic, and San Francisco. Shortly after the publication of his third book, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, he took a job as a senior writer at the Industry Standard, and, after that publication’s unfortunate demise, became a regular contributor to Wired.
Between 2003 and 2005, he covered tech for the New York Times. And starting in 2005 he spent eight months covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, research that contributed to his book Katrina: After the Flood.
In 2010, he published Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business, a deep dive into the subprime economy.
In 2017, he shared a piece of a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for the “Panama Papers” as one of the reporters on the team assembled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Since then, he’s ghostwritten several books while publishing two of his own, Saving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19 and AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence.External
How One Small Business Found Sweet Success During the Pandemic
Time | November | 2022
A Bronx chocolate maker survives Covid.
The New York Times Magazine | May | 2004
I go inside a slot machine factory for the New York Times Magazine. The diabolical brilliance of this modern-day marvel that generates the bulk of any casino’s profits.
The New York Times Magazine | March | 2014
Growing rich in the trailer park business.
Publications by this author
Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence
HarperCollins | April | 2025
Rivlin shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work.
Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally come?
Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment.Small Business in the Time of COVID-19
Harper Business | October | 2022
Rivin follows a group of small business owners as they struggle to keep their businesses alive during Covid.
TJ Cusumano, the chef-owner of Cusumano’s, just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania; Vilma Hernandez, the immigrant owner of Vilma’s Beauty Salon in Hazleton, Penn.; Glenda Shoemaker, the owner of a “non-life sustaining” gift and card shop in the rural town of Tunkhannock, Penn.; and Dominic, Nicholas, and Daniel Maloney, three black siblings behind Sol Cacao, a high-end chocolate maker in the Bronx.
Each of these are survivors who have stared down the big box stores, chains, the Internet, and everything else the market has thrown their way. A pandemic is just the latest challenge to keeping their doors open.After the Flood
Simon & Schuster | August | 2016
On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects not just on the area’s geography and infrastructure, but also on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities.
Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina as a staff reporter for the New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered most of the city’s water and sewer system unusable. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many people were turning to their government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back?
From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. How the Working Poor Became Big Business
Harper Business | June | 2011
Broke, USA is my report from the economic fringes. In the two years I spent researching the poverty industry, I ventured to Las Vegas to hang out at the annual check cashers convention, I spent time in Tennessee with the small-town debt collector who founded the modern-day, $40-billion-a-year payday cash advance industry, I met with mercenary entrepreneurs who are getting tens of millions of dollars rich selling high-priced products to the country’s hardworking waitresses, warehouse workers, and mall clerks.
By telling the story of the rise of the poverty business—an industry that today is larger than the casino industry—I chronicle the early roots of the subprime meltdown and explore any number of diabolically brilliant ways businesses have devised to grow very, very rich off those with thin wallets. I also tell of a few of the more committed souls who for years had been sounding the alarm about a pending subprime disasters and fighting back against the major corporations, chain franchises, and newly-hatched enterprises that grow fat with profits at the expense of the working poor.
Crown Business | July | 1999
A fun, warts-and-all look at the world’s Richest Man and the corporate titans who, despite their age and all the’ve accomplished, become teen-boy-like obsessed with proving themselves bigger, better, or smarter than Gates. Think Moby Dick in Silicon Valley, where a loose knit cabal of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most successful leaders make up a kind of Capt. Ahab’s club distracted by the Great White Whale from Redmond, Wash. Yet Gates, the slope-shouldered billionaire with bad hair only seems to grow bigger, hungrier, and more dangerous after each attack.
Henry Holt & Co
Drive-By offers a look at the youth violence epidemic plaguing the country in the 1990s through the dissection of a single drive-by shooting that left a 13-year-old dead and a pair of 14-year-olds in the hospital.
Rivinʼs second book was a finalist in both PEN-West’s 1995 “Best of the West” and the 1995 San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association competition. Drive-By was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Chicagoʼs Harold Washington and the Politics of Race
Henry Holt & Co | January | 1992
Published by Henry Holt, this book, Rivinsʼ first, won the Carl Sandburg Award for Non-Fiction in 1992. It also won the Chicago Sun-Times’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year award that same year. “If we crack Chicago, then we crack the world,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, and then black empowerment “would take off like a prairie fire across the land.” The book was a Chicago best-seller.
Media by this author
Interview | May | 2025
The AI transformation of our world has already begun, and Silicon Valley has positioned itself to be home base. But how did the AI takeover happen so rapidly there? Who were the founders and investors who opened the floodgates?
Investigative journalist Gary Rivlin has more than two decades of experience writing about the tech industry. In his new book, AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, he gives readers an up-close look at the players behind AI’s dramatic rise to dominance in the tech world.
Gary and Greg discuss some of the key moments in AI’s recent history, the role of venture capital in tech, how Silicon Valley's unique ecosystem lends itself to AI innovation, and what the future could hold for artificial intelligence.Interview | April | 2025
On intelligent machines, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Mike Elgan speak to author Gary Rivlin about his book AI Valley and the past and present states of the AI industry.
Interview | March | 2023
Saving Main Street is an unfiltered, up-close examination of a small group of business owners running a business during COVID times and their employees, their struggles, and their strategies to survive. It is an tale of grit, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit that follows three businesses: a restaurant owner and his rambunctious staff, an immigrant running her own hair salon, and the owner of a “non-life sustaining” gift shop—alongside a larger cast of vividly drawn characters.
Gary Rivlin focuses on the first days of the Covid lockdown and the ensuing eighteen months of chaos, including the personal and financial risks, a contentious presidential election, and contradictory governmental guidelines—all which compounded the everyday challenges of running an independent business trying to attract and retain customers who expect low prices, convenience, and endless choice.
Rivlin keenly observes small businesses from all angles, examining commonly held “myths”; contradictions in government policy; enormous racial and class fissures; a national self-identity intrinsically connected to the ideal of small business, and how the decline of this American way of retail impacts our notions of American exceptionalism, community, and civic duty. As Rivlin reveals, there’s something enduring about small business in the American psyche.
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