Keynote Speaker and Texas-based FORTUNE Magazine, editor at large, Peter Elkind uncovers high-stakes sagas in the business world and chronicles them for FORTUNE.

Peter is co-author, with FORTUNE colleague Bethany McLean, of “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Incredible Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron,” a national bestseller published in 2003. The 2005 documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2006, Elkind and McLean covered the Houston trial of former Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling for FORTUNE.

Elkind joined FORTUNE in November 1997, after freelancing for the magazine for a year. From December 1991 to April 1996 he served as editor of the Dallas Observer. Under his stewardship, the newspaper won a Penney Missouri award from the University of Missouri for best weekly in the country. The paper was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Among other prizes, he is a two-time recipient of the World Leadership Forum’s “Journalist of the Year” award.

His in-depth stories featured in FORTUNE Magazine include:

• “Payback: The fall of America’s meanest law firm,”
• A Profile of Eliot Spitzer (“Satan or Savior?”),
• “The Truth About Halliburton,”
•  “The Fall of the House of Grasso,”
•  “Where Mary Meeker Went Wrong,”
•  “The Hidden Face of Janus,” and
•  “The Incredible Half-Billion-Dollar Azerbaijani Oil Swindle,” about Viktor Kozeny, known as “The Pirate of Prague.”

Elkind was also on the staff of Texas Monthly for eight years. He won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award for his report on a nurse accused of killing children under her care. He published the story in the highly acclaimed true-crime book, The Death Shift (Viking, 1989). Elkind graduated with honors from Princeton University in 1980, with a major in public affairs.

He has been a guest on numerous radio and television programs, including Nightline, CNN Newsnight, and The Charlie Rose Show.