Nick Denton turned Gawker into the king of digital media at a time when publishers were still figuring out the internet. But he came to loathe it.
“I hated Gawker,” Denton told New York magazine in an interview published on Monday. Denton founded the company in 2002 and led it through more than a decade of gossipy rabble-rousing before a lawsuit over a Hulk Hogan sex tape killed it in 2016.
Denton, who said he planned to leave New York for Budapest, told the magazine he despised how intellectually “homogenous” the website’s writers had become between 2012 and 2015.
“They seemed somehow lobotomized,“ he said. ”I would get frustrated, not able to understand where they were coming from. What motivates you? Seriously, what drives you, what motivates you, what are you passionate about? And it was like talking to a bunch of robots. And these are smart people."
Denton said he ended up being unable to read the website and was grateful when he “fired half the staff in an afternoon.”
Denton offered a buyout to employees in 2015 after some objected to his decision to remove a post about a married media executive who hired a male escort.
“Thank God, thank God,” he said of the exodus. “Because I was ashamed. I was just ashamed.”
In discussing Gawker’s short-lived relaunch in 2021, Denton offered some praise for Gawker’s grim reaper, Peter Thiel, the Palantir billionaire who paid $10 million to finance Hogan’s lawsuit against the outlet, which ultimately brought about its demise. Thiel bankrolled the suit years after Gawker reported he was gay.
“It did come back in some bastard form,” he said. “But I think it was a sufficient interval that that was clearly another thing. But yeah, I agreed with Peter Thiel’s criticisms.”
Denton also wrote on X last week that Thiel was “right, as usual” that Democratic politicians were less smart than Republicans after Thiel said Kamala Harris, who attended Howard University, received an inferior education than Trump, who went to the University of Pennsylvania, and JD Vance, who attended Yale Law School.
Denton told New York he was interested in Thiel’s views on foreign policy as Trump upends America’s traditional alliances.
“I want to know why he’s so quiet when he ought to be at his point of maximum power,” he said. “I’m super-curious about his attitude towards Vance, while Vance is busy destroying the Atlantic alliance, and Palantir depends on the Atlantic alliance for a large portion of its contracts. I’m very curious as to how Peter Thiel thinks about the abuse of America’s most loyal allies in Europe.”
