Jen Wieczner

Jen Wieczner writes long-form features for New York Magazine about Wall Street, business, cryptocurrency, and the ways money and power collide. Her reporting is distinguished by deep, character-driven investigations into opaque financial schemes and crypto ventures, built around original documents and interviews with the people running them. She approaches money stories as narratives about power, risk, and reputation rather than market coverage alone.

The Money Game: Wall Street and High-Stakes Bets

Within New York’s Money Game franchise, Wieczner covers Wall Street and markets through the lens of specific bets and the people making them.

In “Wall Street’s Eyes on the Strait,” she follows an analyst dispatched by Citrini Research to the Strait of Hormuz, using his trip through a war zone to show how attacks on tankers reshape energy markets and investor risk. In “Is the Economy Great or Terrible?” she profiles economist Torsten Slok, focusing on how his newsletter guides insiders’ views of growth, inflation, and risk rather than on data points alone. “Shayne Coplan’s Big Bet Is Paying Off” centers on the founder of prediction-market platform Polymarket, exploring how a billion-dollar betting business blurs lines between political forecasting, gambling, and financial regulation.

Features such as “Nightmare on Wall Street” and “Inside the Harvard Business School Ponzi Scheme” similarly treat market turmoil and alleged fraud as lived experiences for traders, classmates, and clients, not abstract events.

Crypto Empires, Regulation, and World Liberty Financial

Wieczner devotes much of her work to cryptocurrency as part of a broader system of politics, banking, and personal brands. Her recent cover story on Donald Trump’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial traces how the project has put hundreds of millions of dollars in the president’s pocket, built on investments from billionaire Justin Sun and a group of lesser-known operators.

The piece combines Sun’s first interview since suing the project for fraud with reporting on the people behind the company and how they won Trump’s support.

Earlier, in “What Is Trump Even Doing With His New Crypto Company?” she examines the same venture at launch, asking what kind of business it really is and how it fits into attempts to build one-stop crypto-banking shops. In “A Very Crypto Mystery,” she investigates industry claims that the Biden administration quietly deprived crypto firms of access to banks, following lobbyists, lawmakers, and executives hunting for proof. She has also reported on how large institutions such as JPMorgan handle deposits from crypto companies, showing the gradual integration of digital-asset firms into mainstream finance.

Across these stories, her distinguishing focus is on the collision of crypto projects with regulation, politics, and the traditional banking system.

Crypto Crime, Collapse, and Fallen Kingpins

Wieczner frequently follows crypto into its criminal and borderline-criminal edges, where loose rules meet extreme leverage.

In “The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse,” she narrates an outrageous kidnapping scheme tied to digital assets, using vivid scenes and sources to show how crypto enabled new forms of extortion and how its protagonists fit into the city’s underground economy. Her feature “How Su Zhu and Kyle Davies Are Dodging Jail” tracks the fallen managers of Three Arrows Capital as they try to avoid prison and rebrand after their fund’s collapse, documenting a pattern of evasions and rebranding efforts. She has written about the arrest of Su Zhu and the way he and Kyle Davies attempt to reframe their story for a new wave of investors.

Other work, including pieces on a Hamptons fashion designer’s mysterious death and schemes linked to elite institutions, extends her interest in how status and wealth intersect with fraud, violence, and sudden collapse. On her own site she highlights earlier investigations into hacks at leading Bitcoin exchange Coinbase and activist hedge funds such as Elliott Management, which carry the same themes of opacity, aggressive tactics, and the human costs of financial engineering.

Career in Business and Finance Journalism

Wieczner has covered Wall Street, business, and crypto for more than a decade, building a beat that bridges technology and high finance. She writes features for New York Magazine and its Intelligencer vertical. Before joining New York, she wrote for outlets including Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, focusing on finance, health care, and large businesses.

Her portfolio includes profiles of hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, activist investor Paul Singer, and executives such as Meg Whitman, along with deep dives into insider-trading scandals and activist tactics. She has received multiple awards for business and financial reporting, including honors for magazine feature writing and coverage of hedge funds and crypto.

Across both current and past work, her consistent through-line is detailed, document-heavy reporting that explains how complex financial structures shape individual lives, rather than commentary or short news updates.