Before joining Teneo in January 2022, Nelson D. Schwartz spent more than two decades as a leading business journalist, first at Fortune and then at The New York Times.
Nelson specializes in developing narratives and explaining complex stories through compelling examples and vivid writing. He is also skilled at using data and analyzing information to discover fresh insights.
Nelson started at the Times as a feature writer for Sunday Business in 2007, covering the run-up to the global financial crisis in 2008 before moving to Paris as the paper’s European financial correspondent. Nelson returned to New York in 2010 to report on banking and Wall Street before switching to the economics beat in 2012. In addition to pace-setting coverage of employment, manufacturing, and corporate trends, he also authored a book published by Doubleday in 2020 called The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business.
At Fortune, he wrote frequent cover stories and profiled Fortune 500 CEOs and companies, with a special interest in the financial sector. He also covered the energy industry globally, reporting from Libya, Venezuela, Russia, and Iraq. From 2004 to 2007, Nelson served as Europe Editor for Fortune, writing about business in the U.K., the Continent and the Middle East and attending the World Economic Forum in Davos annually.
Nelson earned the Nathaniel Nash Award from the Times in 2014, given annually “to the reporter who best excels in business and economics news.”
A native of Scarsdale, N.Y., he graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in History. Nelson lives with his family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.