Lina Khan: The 32-Year-Old Who Took on Amazon

In June 2021, the United States Senate confirmed a 32-year-old law professor named Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission. The vote was 69 to 28, with seventeen Republicans crossing over. She had never run an agency. She had never tried a case. She had graduated from law school four years earlier. By the next morning, Amazon's stock price ticked down and the company's lawyers were already drafting a petition demanding she recuse herself from any investigation involving them.

Khan was born on March 3, 1989, in London to Pakistani immigrant parents — her mother worked at Thomson Reuters, her father in management consulting. The family lived in Golders Green, in the Borough of Barnet. When she was eleven they moved to Mamaroneck, New York, a suburb in Westchester County, where she edited the high school newspaper. She studied political science at Williams College in Massachusetts, spent her junior year at Exeter College, Oxford, and wrote her senior thesis on Hannah Arendt. She graduated in 2010.

Her first job was at the New America Foundation in Washington, where she worked under Barry Lynn at the Open Markets Program. Lynn was specifically looking for a researcher without an economics background — he wanted someone who hadn't been trained inside the consumer welfare framework that had defined American antitrust since the 1970s. From 2010 to 2014, Khan wrote about market consolidation in industries from agriculture to airlines.

She then chose Yale Law School over a reporting job covering commodities at the Wall Street Journal. In January 2017, during her third year, the Yale Law Journal published her note "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." The title was a deliberate inversion of Robert Bork's 1978 book "The Antitrust Paradox," which had argued that antitrust law should focus narrowly on consumer prices. Khan argued the opposite: that Amazon's whole strategy — selling below cost for years to dominate categories — was invisible under Bork's framework precisely because consumers loved the low prices. By September 2018, the article had 146,255 downloads, which the New York Times called a runaway bestseller in the world of legal treatises. It won the 2018 Antitrust Writing Award for best academic unilateral conduct article.

After Yale she became legal director at the Open Markets Institute, which had spun off from New America after Google — a major New America funder — pressured the parent organization over Khan's team's criticism. In 2018 she joined the FTC as a legal fellow under Commissioner Rohit Chopra. In 2019 she served as counsel to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, leading the sixteen-month congressional investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. In July 2020 she joined Columbia Law as an associate professor. President Biden nominated her to the FTC on March 22, 2021. Three months later she was the youngest chair in the agency's history.

What followed was four years of activist enforcement. In July 2021 the FTC voted unanimously to make right to repair an enforcement priority. In April 2024 the agency issued a regulation banning enforcement of existing non-compete agreements for everyone except senior executives, and prohibiting new ones for any employee — affecting an estimated thirty million American workers. A federal court in Texas struck the rule down in August 2024 as an overreach of statutory authority. In October 2024 the FTC adopted the click-to-cancel rule, requiring subscription services to make canceling as easy as signing up. The agency sued the three pharmacy benefit managers — Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — over insulin pricing.

Her merger record was mixed. The FTC lost the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard case in 2023 and Meta's acquisition of the VR fitness company Within. In December 2023, after a three-year fight, the agency forced Illumina to divest Grail, the cancer-screening company it had acquired for seven billion dollars. In November 2024 Tapestry abandoned its 8.5-billion-dollar acquisition of Capri Holdings — the parent of Coach and Michael Kors — after the FTC blocked it. In December 2024 the agency blocked Kroger's bid for Albertsons. Lockheed Martin and Sanofi each abandoned multi-billion-dollar deals after the FTC raised objections, without a court ever ruling.

Inside the agency, the picture was harder. In 2020, 94.3 percent of FTC staff said they had favorable views of senior leadership. By 2021 that number was 51.7 percent. By 2022 it was 46.6 percent. The agency went from ranking first among federal workplaces to first in unfavorable views. Khan's first major act — banning FTC staff from public speaking — was rescinded in 2022 with a public apology from her deputy. By the 2023 survey, morale had recovered roughly half its decline.

Her supporters were unusual. JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio, told The Hill in February 2024 that Khan was "doing a pretty good job." Steve Bannon defended her on his podcast. The Wall Street Journal nicknamed the cohort "Khanservatives." None of it saved her job. On January 20, 2025, the day Trump returned to office, she was replaced by Andrew Ferguson. She formally left the commission on January 31.

In November 2025, after Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, he named Khan co-chair of his transition team. In April 2026, Columbia announced she would head a new Center for Law and the Economy. She was thirty-seven years old, with one published student note that had already moved a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar antitrust suit against her former target — Amazon — into its third year of pretrial motions.