Andrew Ross Sorkin

Andrew Ross Sorkin is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.

Sorkin was born in New York, the son of Joan Ross Sorkin, a playwright, and Laurence T. Sorkin, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Sorkin graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1995 and earned a Bachelor of Science in communications from Cornell University in 1999, where he was a member of the Sigma Pi fraternity. He is not related to writer Aaron Sorkin nor defense lawyer Ira Lee Sorkin. His family heritage and religion are Jewish.

Sorkin first joined The New York Times as a student intern during his senior year in high school. He also worked for the paper while he was in college, publishing 71 articles before he graduated. He began by writing media and technology articles while assisting the advertising columnist Stuart Elliott. Sorkin spent the summer of 1996 working for Businessweek before returning to The New York Times. He moved to London in part of 1998. While there, he wrote about European business and technology for The New York Times and then returned to Cornell to complete his studies. At Cornell, he was vice president of the Sigma Pi fraternity. 

Sorkin joined The New York Times full-time in 1999 as the newspaper's European mergers and acquisitions reporter and was based in London. In 2000, Sorkin became the paper's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, based in New York, a position he still holds. In 2001, Sorkin founded "DealBook," an online daily financial report published by the Times. As Editor-at-Large of "DealBook," Sorkin writes a weekly column of the same name. Sorkin is also an assistant editor of business and finance news for the paper.

Sorkin has broken news of major mergers and acquisitions, including Chase's acquisition of J.P. Morgan and Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq. He also led The New York Times' coverage of the largest takeover in history, Vodafone's $183 billion hostile bid for Mannesmann. Additionally, he broke the news of IBM's sale of its PC business to Lenovo, Boston Scientific's $25 billion acquisition of Guidant, and Symantec's $13 billion deal for Veritas Software. He reported on News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.

Sorkin has reported on the Wall Street financial crisis, including the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and the government bailout of other major investment banks and AIG. He has also written about the troubled American auto industry.

In 2007, Sorkin was one of the first journalists to identify and criticize a tax loophole for private equity firms and hedge funds. He first wrote about the topic in a column in March 2007, calling the tax treatment a "charade," and later wrote about it on the front page of The New York Times. He has written at least a half dozen articles critiquing the tax practice by private equity firms and advocated for the government to end the loophole.

In 2014, Sorkin wrote a series of columns criticizing American corporations for trying to lower their US tax bill by merging with smaller foreign companies in a transaction known as an "inversion." He also criticized the Wall Street banks that advised US companies to pursue such deals, describing the banks as "corporate co-conspirators." Sorkin called on the government to end the practice. On September 22, 2014, the Obama Administration changed the tax laws to make it more difficult for US companies to merge to avoid taxes.

On the PRISM surveillance program and Edward Snowden's situation, Sorkin said, "I would arrest him, and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who seems to be out there; he wants to help him get to Ecuador." The next day, Sorkin apologized for the comment; Greenwald accepted, tweeting, "Thank you: accepted & appreciated."

In October 2001, while a journalist at The New York Times, Sorkin started DealBook, a newsletter about deal-making and Wall Street. DealBook was one of the first financial news aggregation services on the Internet. In March 2006, Sorkin introduced a companion website published in The New York Times, with updated news and original analysis throughout the day. In 2007, DealBook won a Webby Award for Best Business Blog, and it won a SABEW award for overall excellence. In 2008, the site won an Eppy Award for Best Business Blog.