Scott Galloway — NYU Professor, Entrepreneur, and Tech Critic

Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, a serial entrepreneur, and one of the most blunt voices in business media today. He built companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, wrote six books, runs one of the top business podcast networks in the world, and has never stopped picking fights with the powerful.

His sharpest targets have been Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google — what he collectively calls “The Four.” But in recent years, his commentary has widened to cover economic inequality, the male crisis, AI disruption, and the political sway of tech billionaires. In February 2026, he publicly called on consumers to unsubscribe from major tech platforms as a form of economic protest against the Trump administration’s policies — a statement that made headlines and illustrated exactly how far his platform has grown beyond the classroom.

This profile covers everything worth knowing: his background, the companies he built, his books, his podcast empire, and why his views still generate heated debate.

Who Is Scott Galloway?

Scott Galloway was born on November 3, 1964, and grew up in Los Angeles, California. His father was a Scottish immigrant who worked as a sales executive; his mother, a Jewish immigrant from London, worked as a secretary. That working-class background — not Silicon Valley royalty — is something he frequently references when discussing wealth inequality.

He graduated from UCLA in 1987 with a degree in economics and went straight to Wall Street, working as a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley. He later earned his MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Galloway is married to Beata Galloway, a real estate developer born in Poland, whom he met at the Raleigh Hotel pool in Miami. They have two sons together. Since 2022, the family has lived in London.

Entrepreneurial Career: The Companies He Built

Galloway’s credibility as a business commentator comes directly from having built — and sometimes failed with — real companies.

• Prophet (1992) — A brand and marketing consultancy he founded straight out of his post-Morgan Stanley years. It remains operational today, working with major global brands on positioning and growth strategy.
• RedEnvelope (1997) — Launched as 911Gifts.com, this e-commerce gifting company went public in 2003 but filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The failure gave him firsthand experience with the brutal economics of early e-commerce — and he talks about it openly.
• L2 Inc. (2010) — A digital intelligence firm that benchmarked how well consumer brands performed online. L2 was acquired by Gartner in March 2017 for $155 million. This was Galloway’s clearest financial success and validated his analytical approach to digital marketing.
• Firebrand Partners (2005) — An activist hedge fund that invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies. Now defunct.
• Section (2019) — Originally called Section 4, this executive education startup delivers business education online. It raised $30 million in a Series A round led by General Catalyst in 2021, bringing total funding to approximately $37 million. Section remains one of his most active current ventures.

Academic Career at NYU Stern

Galloway has taught at NYU Stern School of Business since 2002, where he holds the title of Clinical Professor of Marketing. His courses focus on brand management and digital marketing for second-year MBA students.

His classroom approach is well documented: he uses current tech giants as primary case studies, relies on data-heavy analysis, and is deliberately provocative. Former students describe his teaching style as direct to the point of being uncomfortable — which is, by most accounts, the whole point.

Beyond teaching, he served on the boards of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He also delivered high-profile public presentations called Winners & Losers, which ranked more than 2,500 global brands on digital performance using L2’s Digital IQ Index.

His commitment to public education extends to major philanthropy. In 2017, he donated $4.4 million to UC Berkeley for immigrant student fellowships. In July 2024, he donated $12 million to UCLA and UC Berkeley combined to establish the UC “Excelerator” program.

Books: The Complete List

Galloway has written six books. Each translates academic and business analysis into something a general audience can use.

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (2017)

His breakout book. It argues that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have leveraged instinct — shelter, love, sex, and God respectively — to achieve near-monopolistic power. The analysis of platform economics and winner-take-all dynamics remains widely assigned in business courses.

The Algebra of Happiness (2019)

Part memoir, part career guide. Galloway argues that happiness follows predictable patterns: prioritize relationships, invest early, spend on experiences over things, and avoid conflating status with satisfaction.

Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity (2020)

Written during the pandemic, it examined which businesses the crisis would accelerate versus destroy, and how institutions — higher education especially — would need to adapt.

Adrift: America in 100 Charts (2022)

A data-visualization-driven look at economic and social trends — income inequality, declining social mobility, the fraying of the middle class. Less prescriptive than his other books, more diagnostic.

The Algebra of Wealth (2024)

His most practical personal finance guide. It lays out a formula: focus × stoicism × time × diversification = wealth. Written for people who want to build financial security, not just admire it from the outside.

Notes on Being a Man (2025)

Published by Simon & Schuster, this is his most personal book. It addresses the growing crisis affecting young men — falling behind in education and the labor market, rising rates of isolation and suicide — and what Galloway believes being a man should look like today. The book launched alongside significant media coverage and live events, including a conversation with Ben Stiller at 92NY.

Podcasts and Media: The Prof G Network

Galloway’s media output has grown into a full podcast network operating under Prof G Media, distributed through the Vox Media Podcast Network.

The Prof G Pod — His flagship show. The format has expanded significantly from its 2020 launch. As of 2026, the weekly schedule runs across five formats:

• Office Hours (Monday/Friday): Galloway answers listener questions on careers, money, and life.
• China Decode (Tuesday): Co-hosted by Alice Han and James Kynge, covering economic and political developments in China.
• Raging Moderates (Wednesday): Co-hosted with political strategist and Fox News contributor Jessica Tarlov, analyzing major political stories from a centrist perspective.
• Conversations (Thursday): Galloway in long-form dialogue with thinkers from business, geopolitics, tech, and culture.
• No Mercy / No Malice (Saturday): His Webby Award-winning newsletter read aloud by actor George Hahn.

Pivot — Co-hosted with journalist Kara Swisher, released every Tuesday and Friday. The show covers tech industry news, business strategy, and the intersection of Silicon Valley and politics. It consistently ranks among the top business podcasts globally.

Prof G Markets — A daily markets podcast co-hosted with Ed Elson, designed to build financial literacy around news affecting capital markets.

Galloway also publishes his No Mercy / No Malice newsletter on Substack via profgmedia.com, where subscribers get ad-free podcast versions, full newsletter archives, livestreams, and Q&A access.

Key Ideas and Intellectual Contributions

Galloway’s thinking spans marketing, economics, and social policy. A few threads appear consistently across his work:

• His core argument in The Four — that Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet have used network effects and data moats to achieve market concentration that resembles a monopoly — has influenced antitrust debates globally.
• He teaches that durable brands connect to human instincts. Functional features are table stakes; identity and belonging are the real product.
• A major theme in Notes on Being a Man and his recent podcast work: young men are falling behind in education, struggling socially, and dying of despair at higher rates than women. He argues that this crisis is politically inconvenient to acknowledge and largely ignored by mainstream media.
• Galloway has argued in 2025 and 2026 that artificial intelligence benefits primarily capital owners, not workers — and that without significant policy intervention, it will concentrate wealth further upward.
• A consistent target of his. He argues that elite universities function more as luxury brands than educational institutions, pricing out the middle class and gatekeeping opportunity behind credential inflation.

Board Experience

Galloway has served on the boards of directors of:

• The New York Times Company
• Eddie Bauer
• Gateway Computer
• Urban Outfitters
• UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

This board-level experience — across media, retail, and academia — gives his analysis of corporate governance and executive behavior a grounding that pure commentators often lack.

Public Controversies and Ongoing Debates

Galloway has never been a consensus figure. His willingness to take strong, sometimes contradictory positions has made him both influential and easy to criticize.

He called for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s removal in December 2019, while simultaneously disclosing that he owned more than 330,000 shares of Twitter stock — a conflict of interest his critics have cited repeatedly. He endorsed Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign, describing him as the “strong centrist candidate” Democrats needed.

More recently, his comments on economic protest — urging consumers to leave dominant tech platforms in February 2026 — generated significant media coverage, drawing both support from critics of Silicon Valley’s political entanglements and pushback from those who see the strategy as ineffective.

His analysis of companies has been criticized for oversimplifying complex business models and for making sweeping predictions that don’t always materialize. He acknowledges this: predictions, he says, are a bad business. He still makes them every year.

What Makes His Work Worth Engaging With

Galloway occupies an unusual position: an academic with real entrepreneurial scars, a media personality with serious analytical training, and a wealthy man who spends a significant amount of time criticizing wealth concentration. His critics call this hypocritical. His supporters call it honest.

What is consistent across his books, podcasts, and public appearances is a focus on structural forces — how markets are designed, who benefits, and what that means for people without capital. Whether discussing Big Tech antitrust, the cost of a university degree, or why young men are struggling, he tends to trace problems to system design rather than individual failure.

For professionals, investors, or students trying to understand how modern business actually works — not how it presents itself — his output remains one of the more useful starting points available.