Elizabeth MacBride’s Journey from Jerusalem to Montana

Alexandria, VA – On Dec. 3, 2025, at 6:00 a.m., Elizabeth MacBride apprehensively loaded the USA Today best-selling book list. Looking through the site’s recommendations, her hopes dwindled as she moved through the page. There she saw her name displayed prominently next to Capital Evolution, her life’s work in writing for the past few months. Her eyes grew wide as she frantically texted her friends, family, and co-author, realizing her life was about to take a major turn.

Twelve years earlier, MacBride was in a much different place. A recent divorcee and single mom to two young girls, she had just resigned because her company’s new CEO mandated relocation to California. “I like my house, my neighborhood,” she explained. “So I thought, how can I make enough money to work on my own?” The answer was freelancing.

“I was scared but also determined. I threw myself into every job that I could, in every way, shape, or form.” Trying to pay the bills each month and provide for her daughters Lillie and Quinn, she spent three hours every night writing articles after the girls went to bed. She often took phone calls and interviewed people from her car during the day’s errands. For one 7 a.m. interview, she told 8-year-old Lillie to get herself and Quinn dressed and ready for school alone.

Then MacBride got her first big break: A friend, mentor, and CNBC vice president invited her to report on the refugees in Jordan from the Syrian civil war. Although MacBride had no experience in Middle East affairs, she got to work right away. Her interest in the region only grew. “The more work I did, the more I felt like I was making a difference,” she said.

Eventually MacBride started flying to the Middle East as well. But instead of paying a friend or babysitter to watch Lillie and Quinn, she decided to take them with her. “I wanted them to see the world,” she explained. “But even more than that, I wanted them to develop the critical thinking skills that come from traveling. When you go to a different place, you meet people that seem very different from you. It helps you build your empathy; it helps you build your perspective. You start to realize you’re not the center of the world.”

For a few years, MacBride and her kids lived, ate, and shopped for weeks on end in Israel, Dubai, or Oman as she churned out stories, mostly about local businesses and entrepreneurs. At the same time, she had to walk on eggshells covering Middle East issues for an American audience. “Americans are so sensitive about Israel-Palestine that when you write about Palestinian people, you get censored,” she said. After she wrote a nonpolitical story about Palestinian entrepreneurs in Ramallah, she lost three of her biggest corporate clients.

Around this time, MacBride met Abigail Disney, Walt Disney’s great grandniece, outspoken critic of the company, and filmmaker who had also experienced censorship reporting on the Middle East. While interviewing Disney for a Dubai magazine, the women connected over their shared experiences. Disney soon offered to let MacBride help her write a book about guns in the United States.

From that point, MacBride’s coverage shifted away from the Middle East and toward American gun culture. She went undercover at a National Rifle Association convention and witnessed her colleague get kicked out right in front of her. Three summers in a row, she went on a 10-day survivalist outfitting trip on horseback into the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana (and took Lillie and Quinn along, too).

“You’re out in the wilderness. There’s no running water, there’s no bathrooms, there’s no showering,” she said. “And it’s pretty scary because you’re up on really high mountains. And you have to trust your horse.”

It was also during this time that MacBride met her future co-author, Seth Levine. A venture capitalist and outdoorsman with similar experiences working in the Middle East, Levine naturally clicked with MacBride. Soon, they were writing a book about business together.

Flash forward to today and Elizabeth MacBride has three books under her name, two of which were co-written with Levine. Their first, The New Builders, portrays the future of American entrepeneurship in a new light as mostly female, dark-skinned, and wildly diverse. Intended to be a coffee table book, it quickly became much more impactful than expected. At one point, Senator Tim Kaine let her know that her reporting was used to shape $250 billion of federal aid during the pandemic.

“It’s a very satisfying moment for journalists when you realize you’ve had that much of an impact,” MacBride said. “It was meaningful.”

Her latest book, Capital Evolution, an optimistic treatise on futurism and the shift toward values-driven capitalism, can be found at Barnes & Noble and other local bookshops. “What I’ve realized after all these years, in this incredible variety of experience, is we create the world we live in,” MacBride said. She plans to write her next book about reframing the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I feel like I’ve made a difference in the world. And that feels like a big privilege.”