The Onion Sold to Founder of Twilio, Who Taps Ex-NBC News Reporter Ben Collins to Lead Satire Site as CEO
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor 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.
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.
