Lane edited his college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania[where?] before interning with The Wall Street Journal.[10] After leaving college, he was hired as a fact checker for Forbes, and thereafter was promoted to be a staff writer.[10][6] In 1991, when he was 27, he was promoted to Washington Bureau Chief,[10][6] before leaving to edit three publications, P.O.V., Trader Monthly,[11] and Dealmaker (defunct).[6] At Trader Monthly, a bimonthly lifestyle magazine where Lane was the editor-in-chief, Lane created a 30 Under 30 list featuring what his magazine considered the 30 best financial traders at the time.[11] When Lane rejoined Forbes in 2011, he created the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list of up and coming figures in multiple business sectors.[6][10]
2010s
Lane wrote a book titled The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.[12] In the book, Lane laid out similarities of some Wall Street traders and Major League Baseball players in their views on the ethics of cheating.[13] He interviewed Lenny Dykstra, about his use of steroids while playing with the New York Mets, for the book.[13] The New York Daily News stated of the book that "Lane does a terrific job... putting things in context".[13]
Lane was born in 1968.[17][18]
He is divorced and has two daughters, Sabrina and Chloe.[17] During the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized and hosted a four-week summer camp for his daughters and their friends, hiring teachers out of work due to the pandemic to instruct them in core subjects.[17]
Kanye West incident
On September 16, 2020, Lane was doxxed in a Twitter rant by American musician Kanye West. West tweeted a screenshot of a phone number labeled "Randall Forbes" and wrote "if any of my fans want to call a white supremacist... this is the editor of Forbes".[19] Twitter deleted West's tweet after 30 minutes and suspended his account for violating Twitter's private information policy.[20] Lane had previously interviewed West about his 2020 presidential ambitions which Forbes published in July 2020.[21]