Ryan Mac

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 Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.^[5]

Ryan Mac
Mac in 2024
Occupation	Journalist, writer
Education	Stanford University (BA)
Notable works	Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)
Notable awards	Mirror Award (2019) George Polk Award in Journalism (2020)
Website
Ryan Mac - The New York Times

Education

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]

Career

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] and 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.^[14] In one of Musk's emails to Buzzfeed News, he referred to Mac as a "f**king asshole".^[14] 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 2024, Mac and co-author Kate Conger released Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,^[17] which covers Musk's poorly executed $44-billion-dollar acquisition of Twitter.^[5]

Personal life

Ryan Mac is an avid supporter of Arsenal Football Club.^[2][18]