William D. Cohan Keynote Speaker

William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling author of five non-fiction narratives: three about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was published in April 2014 and was also a New York Times bestseller. His 2022 book Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon, about the rise and fall of GE, once the world’s most powerful, valuable and important company, was published in November 2022 by PenguinRandomHouse. It was long-listed for the 2022 FT Business Book of the Year Award. It was a New York Times bestseller and on the best book of the year lists published by The New Yorker, The Economist, The Financial Times and the Dealbook section of the New York Times. He is working on a new book about Leon Black and Apollo Global Management.

He is also the author of Why Wall Street Matters, which was published by Random House in February 2017. His book, Four Friends, about what happened to four of his friends of from Andover, his high school, was published by Flatiron Press, a division of Macmillan Publishers, in July 2019.

Cohan is also a founding partner of Puck, a digital publication owned and operated by journalists, and a writer-at-large for Air Mail. For 13 years, he was a special correspondent at Vanity Fair. He also writes, or has written, for ProPublica, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Institutional Investor, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Nation, Fortune, Politico, ArtNews, and Barron’s. He previously wrote a bi-weekly opinion column for The New York Times, an opinion column for BloombergView, as well as for the Dealbook section of the New York Times. He appears on CNN, on MSNBC and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared three times as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He was formerly a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV and CNBC.

He is a graduate of Phillips Academy (Andover), Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and now lives in New York City with his wife and, more occasionally these days, his two sons.