| Ryan Mac | |
| Occupation: | Journalist, writer |
| Education: | Stanford University (BA) |
| Notableworks: | (2024) |
| Awards: |
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Ryan Mac is a Vietnamese-American writer and journalist who works for The New York Times.[1] [2] He has previously worked as a reporter at Buzzfeed News and Forbes. Mac was awarded the 2019 Mirror Award and the 2020 George Polk Award for his reporting on Facebook.[3] [4] He is the co-author of 2024's .[5]
Ryan Mac attended Stanford University from 2007 to 2011. Initially a pre-med student, Mac began writing stories for the Stanford Daily at the end of his freshman year. As a staff writer, Mac often published about new musical releases and music festivals for the Daily's arts section.[6]
Throughout college, Mac served as a reporting intern at the Half Moon Bay Review, New York Times, Bay Citizen, OC Register, and Bloomberg L.P.[7]
From 2011 to 2017, Mac worked as a staff writer for Forbes, compiling their annual list of billionaires before transitioning into covering tech startups and companies. Mac also continued to cover music, interviewing top-earning DJs such as Calvin Harris, Steve Aoki, and Avicii.[8] [9] [10] Mac also had the privilege of interviewing American rapper Riff Raff in 2014.[11] In 2016, Mac reported on Peter Thiel, who had been secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker (Bollea v. Gawker).[12] Alongside reporter Matt Drange, Mac was a 2017 Gerald Loeb Award finalist in the 'Breaking News Category' for their coverage of Gawker.[13]
From 2017 to 2021, Mac worked as a senior technology reporter for Buzzfeed News. In 2018, Mac reported on Elon Musk and Vernon Unsworth, a British cave diver who played an instrumental role in the Tham Luang cave rescue. Mac released a series of email correspondences that revealed Musk had accused Unsworth of being a "child rapist" who had "married a child".[14] Both these claims by Musk were found to be false. In one of Musk's emails to Buzzfeed News, he referred to Mac as a "f**king asshole". These emails were later referenced during Unsworth's $190 million defamation suit against Musk.[15]
Mac was one of ten journalists whose accounts were suspended on X (formerly Twitter) by Elon Musk on December 15, 2022. Mac's Twitter account was unsuspended by Musk 2 days later. [16]
In September of 2024, Mac and co-author Kate Conger released ,[17] which covers Musk's poorly executed $44-billion-dollar acquisition of Twitter.[18]
Ryan Mac is an avid supporter of Arsenal Football Club.[19]