Michael Wolff (journalist)

Michael Wolff (born August 27, 1953) is an American journalist and media consultant, as well as a columnist and contributor to USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter. He has received two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and has authored seven books, including Burn Rate (1998) about his own dot-com company, and The Man Who Owns the News (2008), a biography of Rupert Murdoch. He co-founded the news aggregation website Newser and is a former editor of Adweek.

On January 5, 2018, Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, containing undetermined descriptions of behavior by U.S. President Donald Trump, chaotic interactions among the White House senior staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The book quickly became a New York Times number-one bestseller and was the first of four books about Trump in power, the others being Siege (2019), Landslide (2021) and All or Nothing (2025).

Wolff stated on his podcast that he recorded an estimated 100 hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein over several years, specifically regarding Epstein's relationship with and assessment of Donald Trump.

Early life and education

Michael Wolff was born in 1953 in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Lewis Allen Wolff (1920–1984), a Jewish advertising professional, and Marguerite (Vanderwerf) "Van" Wolff (1925–2012) a reporter for Paterson Evening News. Wolff graduated from Montclair Academy (now Montclair Kimberley Academy) in 1971, where he was student council president in his senior year. He attended Vassar College and transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1975. While a student at Columbia, he worked for The New York Times as a copy boy.

Career

1970s

He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974: a profile of Angela Atwood, a neighbor of his family who helped kidnap Patricia Hearst as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Shortly afterward, he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine started by Jon Larsen and George Hirsch. Wolff's first book was White Kids (1979), a collection of essays.

1990s

In 1991, Wolff launched Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., specializing in book-packaging. Its first project, Where We Stand, was a book with a companion PBS series. The company's next major project was creating one of the first guides to the Internet, albeit in book form. Net Guide was published by Random House.

In the fall of 1998, Wolff published a book, Burn Rate, which recounted the details of the financing, positioning, personalities, and ultimate breakdown of Wolff's start-up Internet company, Wolff New Media. The book became a bestseller. In its review of Wolff's book Burn Rate, Brill's Content criticized Wolff for "apparent factual errors" and said that 13 people, including subjects he mentioned, complained that Wolff had "invented or changed quotes".

In August 1998, Wolff was recruited by New York magazine to write a weekly column. Over the next six years, he wrote more than 300 columns that included criticism of the entrepreneur Steven Brill, the media banker Steven Rattner, and the book publisher Judith Regan.

2000s

Wolff was nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, winning twice. His second National Magazine Award was for a series of columns he wrote from the media center in the Persian Gulf as the Iraq War started in 2003. His book, Autumn of the Moguls (2004), which predicted the mainstream media crisis that hit later in the decade, was based on many of his New York magazine columns.

In 2004, when the owner of New York magazine, Primedia (now Rent Group), put the magazine up for sale, Wolff helped assemble a group of investors, including New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and financier Jeffrey Epstein to back him in acquiring the magazine. Although the group believed it had made a successful bid, Primedia decided to sell the magazine to the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein.

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was "uninterested in the working press," preferring to focus on "the power players—the moguls" and was "fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money." She also noted that "the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events," calling his writing "a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point."

In 2005, Wolff joined Vanity Fair as its media columnist. In 2007, with Patrick Spain, the founder of Hoover's, and Caroline Miller, the former editor-in-chief of New York magazine, he launched Newser, a news aggregator website.

That year, he also wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, based on more than 50 hours of conversation with Murdoch and extensive access to his business associates and his family. The book was published in 2008. Beginning in mid-2008, Wolff briefly worked as a weekly columnist for The Industry Standard, an Internet trade magazine published by IDG. David Carr, in a review Business Insider's Maxwell Tani described as "scathing" wrote that Wolff was "far less circumspect" than most other journalists.

2010s

Wolff received a 2010 Mirror Award in the category Best Commentary: Traditional Media for his work in Vanity Fair.

In 2010, Wolff became editor of the advertising trade publication Adweek. He was asked to step down one year later, amid a disagreement as to "what this magazine should be".

The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Wolff in 2010 for suggesting that The New York Times was aggressively covering the breaking News International phone hacking scandal as a way of attacking News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch.

2020s

From January 2024, Wolff participated in Rewriting Trump, a 90-minute documentary, co-directed by Yasmine Permaul and Arthur Cary, produced by Sky Studios, for Sky Documentaries about Trump's return to the White House, first broadcast on February 28, 2025, and later via NOW TV. Rewriting Trump follows Wolff as he follows the election campaign, while writing his book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America.

As of 2025, Wolff has grown a following on Instagram, where he discusses and explains Trump's personal life.

Wolff has discussed Epstein and Epstein's relationship with Trump in several interviews. Wolff estimates he recorded around 100 hours of interviews with Epstein over several years. Wolff used Epstein as a source for his book Fire and Fury, and Epstein appeared to want Wolff to write his biography. In his discussions on the Trump–Epstein relationship, Wolff recounts how the President and Epstein socialized in the same New York circles and shared an interest in wealth, status, and women. According to Epstein's statements as recounted by Wolff, he was one of Trump's closest friends for a decade before they had a falling out over real estate in 2004. In November 2024, Wolff released a 2017 tape featuring Epstein discussing Trump's approach to internal politics, whereby he played members of his administration off against each other.

Wolff has alleged that Melania Trump was also acquainted with Epstein. Her legal team has since challenged the claim, and The Daily Beast, who interviewed Wolff, retracted stories referencing her ties to Epstein. Around September 2025, The Daily Beast apologized to [Melania] Trump. After Melania's lawyers reportedly threatened Wolff with a $1 billion damages claim over his comments, Wolff sued her on October 22. Wolff is partially covering his expenses in the lawsuit by crowdfunding on GoFundMe.

Emails released by Congress in November 2025 showed that in the course of their exchanges, Wolff advised Epstein regarding Trump. Some journalists assessed that Wolff's conversations with Epstein violated traditional journalistic ethics, which dissuade reporters from advising their subjects. Ben Smith argued that Wolff was primarily a writer and had never been confined by traditional journalistic ethics. Wolff conceded that some of the exchanges were "embarrassing" in retrospect, but denied advising Epstein, arguing that his approach was necessary to gain Epstein's trust.