PERSON: John Heilemann

Bloomberg Politics

Managing Editor

John Heilemann, co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, has covered politics, business, and their intersection for twenty-five years in America and abroad. A regular contributor to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, he is the co-author of the runaway international bestsellers Game Change and Double Down, on the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, respectively.

Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2014 to help launch an ambitious digital and television venture focused on politics and policy, Heilemann was the national affairs editor for New York magazine and NYMag.com. At New York, he wrote the must-read Power Grid column in print and the Impolitic column online, as well as longer features in the magazine. Before joining New York in 2005, Heilemann was a staff writer for The New Yorker, Wired, and The Economist. His first book, Pride Before the Fall, about Bill Gates and the Microsoft antitrust trial, was named by BusinessWeek as one of the best books of 2001. His writing has also appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, TIME, Outside, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and has been anthologized in The Best American Political Writing three times and in The Best American Crime Writing.

With Game Change, Heilemann and his co-author Mark Halperin published what was widely hailed as the definitive account of the historic 2008 election. The book was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller and has been reprinted in eight languages. A movie based on Game Change—starring Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, and Ed Harris—premiered on HBO in 2012 and went on to win five Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, and a Peabody Award. In Double Down, also a New York Times bestseller, Heilemann and Halperin told the inside story of Barack Obama’s reelection over Mitt Romney; HBO has optioned the film rights to the book.

Formerly a longtime political analyst for MSNBC, Heilemann is a regular guest on Charlie Rose and was the host of a four-part documentary on the rise of the World Wide Web, Download, which aired on the Discovery Channel in 2008. A graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he was born in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Diana Rhoten.

— bloomberg.com