The Onion Sold to Founder of Twilio, Who Taps Ex-NBC News Reporter Ben Collins to Lead Satire Site as CEO
The Onion has a new owner: a company called “Global Tetrahedron,” which is a real thing based on a fake entity invented by the satire site more than two decades ago.
G/O Media, a private-equity backed firm that has owned The Onion since 2019, sold the site to a new Chicago-based firm called Global Tetrahedron, which is “made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy-based content,” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said in a memo to staff Thursday.
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Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. A G/O Media rep declined to identify the new owners of The Onion.
The Onion’s new owner is Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, a customer-service software company, he announced Thursday on X (formerly Twitter).
“The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it,” Lawson said. “But its success is based on something different than most media companies. The Onion has been stifled, along with most of the internet, by byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, bizarro belly fat ads, and clickbait content. And we’ve had enough. The internet sucks, and it’s time we made it better. It’s time to focus on customers — end users — again.” To that end, Lawson appealed to fans of The Onion “to pitch in $1. If you care about The Onion, if the Onion ever made you laugh – give us a buck. For that dollar, you get… absolutely nothing. Just a smug sense that you’ve once again spent less on The Onion than its worth in your life.” He linked out to a page on The Onion’s site with a very Onion-y headline: “Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.”
To run Global Tetrahedron as CEO, Lawson hired Ben Collins, formerly senior reporter at NBC News covering “disinformation, extremism and the internet.”
“My friends and I now own and run The Onion. I’ll be the CEO,” Collins posted on X. “We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and shar[ing] the wealth with staff. Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.”
The Onion’s new management team includes chief marketing officer Leila Claire Brillson, previously head of social for dating app Bumble and former exec “of the communist app TikTok” (per Collins) and chief product officer Danielle Strle, former director of community and content at Tumblr.
The Onion, which first launched as a weekly newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wis., carries the tagline “America’s Finest News Source.” Among its most notable series: Since 2014, the has published stories in the wake of U.S. mass-shooting deaths with the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The sale of The Onion comes amid “an extensive review of our portfolio with the intention of coring down to our leading sites in terms of audience and revenues,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo.
Last month, G/O Media sold The AV Club, a spinoff of The Onion that covers pop culture, to Atlanta-based Paste Magazine. Paste previously acquired Jezebel last fall after G/O Media had shut down the site and laid off its staff. In March, G/O laid off the staff of Deadspin and sold the sports news and commentary site to Lineup Publishing, based in Malta, in the island nation located in the Mediterranean Sea. And in March 2023, G/O Media sold how-to site Lifehacker to Ziff Davis.
The new owners of The Onion have agreed to keep the “entire staff intact and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal,” according to Spanfeller. “The Onion for over 35 years has been an indispensable part of our country’s cultural fabric with its unique brand of satire and comedy that continues to be just as important and relevant today than at any time during its storied history. I would like to personally thank The Onion team for their hard work and dedication during their time at G/O Media. They are a talented group of people, who I have no doubt will continue to flourish with their new owners.”
Global Tetrahedron is the name of a fictional company in The Onion’s 1999 book “Our Dumb Century.” The company first appears as a small business in the first decade of the 20th century and “gradually grows into a multinational behemoth,” per the book’s description.
Spanish-language media company Univision acquired a controlling stake in Onion Inc. in January 2016. In 2019, G/O Media bought Chicago-based Onion Inc. in a deal with Univision, along with sites formerly housed under the Gizmodo Media Group (which Univision had acquired those in a bankruptcy sale of Gawker Media’s assets).
G/O Media’s brands now comprise tech site Gizmodo; car culture site Jalopnik; gaming site Kotaku; African American news and culture The Root, business news site Quartz (acquired in 2022) and e-commerce site The Inventory.
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