Brad Stone

Silicon Valley journalist and author

Recent Articles

Battered Dreams, Battered Dreamliner

The grounding of the Boeing 787 was in many respects inevitable for a project marked by narrowed visions and provides a dispiriting example of the shrinking tolerance for risk among corporate executives and government regulators. read more

Does Jeff Bezos Care About Profits?

The Bezos Doctrine is powerful. New businesses don’t have to be good. They just have to appeal to customers. As long as consumers are consuming and shareholders are buying what Bezos is selling, Amazon looks fairly unbeatable. read more

Mapping a Path Out of Steve Jobs’s Shadow

Since Jobs’s death one year ago, many Apple observers have predicted the company would suffer from the loss of his internal authority and intuition about product design and features. Apple is undoubtedly a different company under Tim Cook. It misses Jobs’s conspicuous creativity and entrepreneurial fervor, but it’s gaining in maturity, rationality, and, yes, value. read more

My Life As A Task Rabbit

Silicon Valley startups in the distributed workforce movement want to help auction off our most tedious chores. I dove into the labor pool. read more

Part 3: The Talented M. Despallieres

In 2011 I discovered that “Alex Becker” was also known as Alexandre Despallieres and was in jail for the suspected murder of his husband, music executive Peter Ikin. I retraced the steps of our earlier collaboration and made some unpleasant … read more

How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Silicon Valley

Mark Zuckerberg and his crew have made a series of high-risk moves—five hacks that have changed Silicon Valley forever—that were far more daring than wearing a hoodie to an IPO roadshow. read more

Twitter, the Company that Couldn’t Kill Itself

Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. Twitter, which for years treated the responsibility of earning money as an annoying distraction, may be turning into a viable business. read more

Amazon’s Hit Man

Amazon and New York City book publishers have very different views of the future of the book business. read more

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