Jeff Lawson, the co-founder and recently departed CEO of enterprise infrastructure software company Twilio, is the proud new owner of satirical online newspaper The Onion.
“OK, the news is out – yes, I bought The Onion,” Lawson wrote in a LinkedIn post late Thursday, then came first in the New York Times on Thursday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Considered by many to be “America’s best news source,” the Onion is a digital media institution that has been serving up satire for more than three decades, first as a weekly print edition launched in 1988 and then as an online outlet since 1996 with its physical publication ceasing in 2013. Fake stories have often been mistaken for real news, but The Onion has become a staple of the digital media landscape for its “alternative” response to some of the world’s biggest events — some real, some completely made up — play memes like “Local man” while embracing the reporting style of more traditional news outlets.
“Our Dumb Century”
The Onion has counted several owners over the years (Elon Musk was apparently interested at one point), including Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, which bought a controlling stake in 2016. He then sold it along with Gizmodo to private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2019which created a new holding company called G/O Media Inc.
Now, The Onion has landed in the hands of a new Chicago-based company called Global Tetrahedron, which is actually a reference to a fictional company featured in a satirical book published by The Onion staff in 1999, with title “Our dumb century.”
The brains behind the new World Tetrahedron is Jeff Lawson, who founded Twilio in 2008 as a way to help businesses easily integrate communication features, such as SMS and calling, into their applications through an application programming interface (API). The company went public in 2016 at a valuation of more than $1 billion, reaching nearly $70 billion during the pandemic — before hitting the $10 billion to $15 billion mark in the past two years.
Lawson announced in January that he was leaving Twilio and has since been on a “personal goal pursuit” as part of a career break, according to his LinkedIn profile.
But why would Lawson want to buy The Onion? Well, because he likes it and has the means to buy it.
“The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it,” Lawson said in his announcement. “But its success is based on something different than most media companies. The Onion has been choked, along with most of the internet, by byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, weird belly fat ads, and clickbait content. And we had enough. The internet sucks, and it’s time to make it better. It’s time to refocus on customers — end users —.”
Lawson assures us there’s more to come – new products, new media – but for now he’s asking everyone to raise money for the cause. At the time of writing, The Onion’s home page is filled with “breaking news” and “trending” stories all about this takeover, where Lawson is asking those who share his mission to donate exactly $1. For nothing in return.
“If you care about The Onion, if The Onion has ever made you laugh — give us a buck,” Lawson wrote. “For that dollar, you get… absolutely nothing. Just a smug feeling that you once again spent less than your life’s worth on The Onion.”
