Behind The Vault: America's Most Powerful Financial Dynasty Secrets Revealed, Justin Baer - The WSJ

Few journalists have spent more time inside the power centers of American finance than Justin Baer. As a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, Baer has covered the biggest banks, brokers, and asset managers in the world, from the post-2008 regulatory battles to the pandemic economic shocks that rewrote the rules of investing almost overnight. His reporting has taken him inside Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Pimco, and dozens of other institutions that shape how capital moves through the global economy. Now he has turned that same lens onto one of the most influential and least understood firms in American finance, Fidelity Investments, in his new book The House of Fidelity, a rare behind-the-walls look at a company that has managed roughly $18 trillion across 83 million customer accounts while revealing almost nothing about how it actually operates.On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Justin to unpack the hidden history of Fidelity, what the Johnson family dynasty tells us about the future of American investing, and what journalists and investors alike are getting wrong about artificial intelligence. Justin breaks down how Fidelity survived an existential crisis in the 1970s and came out the other side as the dominant force in American retirement savings, why being a private company turned out to be one of the greatest strategic advantages in financial history, how the democratization of investing really began and who deserves the credit, and what the current AI investment boom has in common with the fiber optic bubble of the late 1990s.