Randall Lane

Randall Lane (born 1968) is an American journalist and author who was the chief content officer and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine until his firing for cause in July 2026. In 2011, Lane created the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

In August 2026, he was fired from his position at Forbes after accepting a secret payment of $6,000,000 from the founder of Shook Research. Shook had worked with Forbes since 2016 to publish rankings of wealth advisers.

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. 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.

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.

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.

In 2024, the unionized editorial staff of Forbes, formed in 2021, passed a vote of no confidence against Lane, as well as former Forbes chief executive officer Michael Federle, charging them with failing to maintain essential standards of editorial integrity, allowing pay inequity and erosion of staff to persist and refusing to be part of productive contract negotiations.

Dismissal from Forbes In July 2026, Lane was fired from Forbes following the discovery of an undisclosed $6 million payment he had received from Shook Research founder RJ Shook. Shook Research subsequently said that the payment was personal and did not involve the company, its research methodology, ranking criteria or adviser-evaluation process.

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. 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.