Who Is Liz Hoffman?
Liz Hoffman is the business and finance editor at Semafor, where she covers Wall Street, corporate dealmaking, and the executives shaping the economy. She co-writes Semafor Business, a twice-weekly newsletter read by more than 50,000 senior executives, alongside reporter Rohan Goswami.
Background
Before joining Semafor, Hoffman spent nine years at The Wall Street Journal, where she built a reputation as one of Wall Street’s best-sourced reporters. She joined the paper in 2013, covering mergers and acquisitions, and broke news on some of the era’s biggest corporate tie-ups, including Burger King’s merger with Tim Hortons, Baker Hughes and Halliburton, Dell’s acquisition of EMC, and a hostile bid for Hershey’s, the company that anchors her Pennsylvania hometown.
She later shifted to covering investment banking, reporting on Goldman Sachs’s push into consumer banking, strain inside the world’s largest venture capital funds, and how the COVID-19 pandemic rattled financial markets. That reporting became the basis for her book, Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World’s Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink, published in 2023.
Education and background
Hoffman is a native of central Pennsylvania. She earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University and a master’s from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
What she covers at Semafor
At Semafor, Hoffman’s beat centers on the intersection of finance, deals, and power: private equity, M&A, big bank strategy, and how corporate leaders are navigating a shifting economy. She’s a regular voice on Semafor’s business coverage and appears on the network’s video and podcast programming, including interviews with executives across banking, media, and tech.
