Gary Rivlin grew up in New York State; a few years after graduating from Northwestern University in Chicago he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for the Contra Costa Times and later the East Bay Express. In 1993 the San Francisco Bay Area Media Alliance named him its print journalist of the year.
Later he was a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for the New York Times and has written award-winning books on a variety of topics. His second book, Drive By, was published in 1995 while he worked for the East Bay Express, where he served as a staff writer and then executive editor. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Wired, and other publications.
Two of Rivlin’s books are about technology: The Plot to Get Bill Gates and The Godfather of Silicon Valley. In 2025 he published his eleventh book AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence. In this book he examines the explosive growth of generative AI and cautions about risks posed by autonomous agents operating with minimal human oversight.