“Smartest Guys in the Room” co-author Elkind to leave Fortune

Peter Elkind, the co-author of “The Smartest Guys in the Room” book about Enron, announced Friday morning that he’s leaving Fortune magazine.

Elkind is currently an editor at large at Fortune, where he has been since 1997. His last day will be Nov. 4.

In an email to his colleagues, Elkind wrote:

I’m grateful for my career at Fortune. It’s offered an extraordinary opportunity, increasingly rare in today’s journalism, to dig deeply into (and explain) big, complex, important stories—to do work that matters.

From here, my plan is to keep doing journalism that makes a difference. In the meantime, I want to express my appreciation and admiration for the amazing group of colleagues—gifted journalists and good friends—I’ve known at Fortune over the years.

Elkind is co-author — with Bethany McLean — of the national bestseller “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron,” author of “The Death Shift: The True Story of Nurse Genene Jones and the Texas Baby Murders,” and author of “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”

He has written for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post, was an associate editor at Texas Monthly, and is a former editor of the Dallas Observer.

His work for Fortune includes such in-depth pieces as “The trouble with Steve Jobs,” about how the CEO of Apple concealed his bout with pancreatic cancer; “The Fall of the House of Grasso,” about former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso’s controversial $140 million pay package; and “The Incredible Half-Billion-Dollar Azerbaijani Oil Swindle,” offering the tale of wheeler-dealer Viktor Kozeny, known as “The Pirate of Prague.”

The 2005 documentary based on the Enron book was nominated for an Academy Award. The Eliot Spitzer saga is also the topic of a documentary by Alex Gibney.

Elkind collaborated with Gibney, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, on both projects as well as his film on Steve Jobs, “The Man in the Machine.”

He has been a guest on numerous radio and television programs, including “The Today Show,” Nightline, CNN Newsnight, and The Charlie Rose Show.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.