Space man, Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, buys The Onion

Jeff Lawson, the co-founder and not too long ago departed CEO of enterprise infrastructure software program firm Twilio, is the proud new proprietor of satirical on-line newspaper The Onion.

“Alright, the news is out — yes, I bought The Onion,” Lawson wrote in a LinkedIn post late Thursday, after it first emerged in The New York Instances Thursday.

Phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The Onion, regarded by many as “America’s finest news source,” is a digital media establishment, serving satire by the spoonful for greater than three many years, first as a weekly print version beginning in 1988, then as a web-based outlet from 1996 with the bodily publication ceasing in 2013. Its spoof stories have usually been conflated with real news, however The Onion has turn out to be a staple a part of the digital media panorama for its “alternative” tackle a few of the world’s largest occasions — some actual, others completely made up — spawning memes equivalent to “Area Man” whereas aping the reporting type of extra conventional information retailers.

“Our Dumb Century”

The Onion has counted a number of house owners by the years (Elon Musk was apparently interested at one point), together with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, which procured a controlling stake in 2016. It then bought it alongside Gizmodo to personal fairness agency Nice Hill Companions in 2019, which created a brand new media holding firm referred to as G/O Media Inc.

Now, The Onion has landed within the palms of a brand new Chicago-based agency referred to as World Tetrahedron, which is the truth is a reference to a fictional agency that seems in a satirical e book printed by The Onion workers in 1999, referred to as “Our Dumb Century.”

The brains behind the brand new World Tetrahedron is Jeff Lawson, who co-founded Twilio way back in 2008 as a manner to assist companies simply embed communication options, equivalent to SMS and calls, into their apps by an software programming interface (API). The corporate went public in 2016 at a valuation of greater than $1 billion, happening to succeed in almost $70 billion throughout the pandemic — earlier than settling on the $10 billion to $15 billion mark these previous couple of years.

Lawson announced back in January that he was stepping down from Twilio, and he has been on a “personal goal pursuit” as a part of a profession break since, based on his LinkedIn profile.

However why would Lawson need to purchase The Onion? Nicely, as a result of he likes it and he has the means to purchase it.

“The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it,” Lawson mentioned in his announcement publish. “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.”

Lawson assures us that extra might be coming sooner or later — new merchandise, new mediums — however for now he’s asking everybody to pony up some money for the trigger. On the time of writing, The Onion’s homepage is plastered with “breaking news” and “trending” tales which are solely about this acquisition, the place Lawson is asking those that share his mission to donate precisely $1. For nothing in return.

“If you care about The Onion, if The Onion ever made you laugh — give us a buck,” Lawson wrote. “For that dollar, you get … absolutely nothing. Just a smug sense that you’ve once again spent less on The Onion than it’s worth in your life.”