While I receded into a corner, alternately spaced out and laughing hysterically, and while Steinberg begged, Peretti grew even more abstracted than usual. He conducted a kind of Socratic dialogue with Steinberg in which he seemed at times to be talking to himself. He asked why Steinberg really wanted to do the deal, and Steinberg scrambled to give whatever answer would push Peretti toward yes. You just want money, right? Yes, Steinberg said. But is it really money you want? Or is it status? You don’t just want a house—you want it in the right part of the Hamptons, right? Sure, yes, status. Steinberg tried to lead Peretti back toward the wisdom of the deal—but Peretti seemed to be exploring his own motives, wondering what he actually wanted as he towered over Steinberg, laughing. Peretti didn’t seem to care about money, and he had a kind of reverse snobbery about the status money would buy. He didn’t even like the theme parks, Peretti told his appalled deputy. Steinberg was crushed and furious at me and at Frank; he believed, probably rightly, that if the three of us had been unified, we could have brought Peretti along. Steinberg and I both stumbled to bed, convinced Peretti would turn the deal down.
Back in New York, when the details came in, it became clear that this was an offer that Peretti, almost, couldn’t refuse. Disney was the most admired media company in the world, with a record of well-managed acquisitions like Marvel and Pixar. The price on offer was $450 million with the potential of earning $200 million more, an extraordinary sum for a company that had priced itself at less than half that just nine months earlier, and whose connection to Disney—a company obsessively protective of its image and its wholesome brands—was just a series of posts like “21 Completely Bizarre Moments in Disney History” (number five: “When Donald Duck promoted condoms during WWII”). Iger was persuasive. Peretti, Steinberg, and Lerer met nightly in the latter’s Upper West Side living room, and Lerer heard them both make their cases—Steinberg’s to sell, Peretti’s about the risks of being stifled by Disney and the potential upside he still saw in the company’s independence. Lerer knew Peretti would bridle at being pushed too hard, so he tried to nudge his protégé toward saying yes. The deal really was, by any normal standard, a no-brainer. On October 29, Peretti and Lerer flew back to Los Angeles, this time staying in Lerer’s preferred hotel, the Chateau Marmont. At nine the next morning, they met Iger and Mayer to go back over the details we’d discussed in the same building five days earlier. Then they all shook hands, and at least some of the men left the room thinking the deal was done. And then, on the flight back, Peretti turned to his seatmate: He didn’t think he could do it. Lerer, incredulous and quietly furious, told Peretti to call Iger and end the talks that day.
Peretti thought it would be more honorable to call it off in person, and so he instead called Iger to say that he wasn’t committed and he’d like to meet again—and suggested they talk after Peretti’s planned speech to Disney’s management retreat in Orlando 12 days later. Peretti was still feeling his old partner Lerer’s anger when he traveled to Disney World in Orlando on November 13 to speak to the company. The event was, for some 250 Disney higher-ups—the people who get to skip the lines at the theme parks—a nearly sacred gathering, running Thursday to Sunday at the sumptuous Grand Floridian Resort. Iger’s smooth public persona dominated the gathering. Executives worked out at 4 a.m. in hopes of running into him at the gym and, if they didn’t see him, returned at 6 a.m. They were the people who ran theme parks in Asia and cruise lines in Europe, and sold content in Latin America and Australia. They signed up for essentially mandatory and strangely competitive sporting events like softball. When Peretti looked down at them from the stage in the grand ballroom, he saw people dressed like their boss, strenuously casual in shorts and collared T-shirts, ready to pretend to be relaxed.
As they gathered, Mayer mentioned to Sherwood that Peretti had asked to meet privately after the speech, shooting his colleague a quizzical look that said “weird guy.” But if that was how he wanted the signing ceremony to go, that was fine. As they watched Peretti deliver his speech, trepidation grew for the executives who had worked on the deal. While Iger had staged Peretti’s speech in a marquee slot to welcome him to the family, the BuzzFeed founder didn’t seem to have prepared with any special care. There were no particular references to Disney, to his audience, his future colleagues. Those who had watched his speeches on YouTube recognized recycled jokes—his yarns about the Nike email and Black People Love Us! and his slides of corgis. As Peretti delivered one of his standard, edgy monologues—he liked to ask whether Mormons were better than Jews and explain that the real difference was about the quality of their distribution networks—an HR executive blanched and told the person sitting next to her that they might have a problem.
Peretti knew he could make himself, his investors, and many of the people who worked for him rich. He knew that the decision was still his to make, and while he was leaning against accepting Disney’s offer, he took the stage without quite having decided. But the reception of his speech confirmed his decision. Peretti had never gotten fewer laughs in his life. He had a vision of himself having to explain the internet to these suits for the rest of his career while they stared blankly back at him and missed his jokes. The thing he had valued from the start when he built a company in his own image was freedom—his own and others’, sometimes to a fault. Peretti couldn’t see himself as an officer on this tight ship. He thought of something his old friend and investor Chris Dixon once said to him: Do you know how many lame rich guys there are, and how few people who really build something? Peretti just couldn’t do it. He walked offstage and into a room with Iger and Mayer. There, he told them apologetically that his heart wasn’t in it. The deal was off. There had been a car ready to take him to celebrate; Peretti took it to the airport.
Iger, who could blow up and regain his cool within seconds, was furious that Peretti had walked away from the deal—and equally puzzled that Peretti had accepted the speaking invitation first.
“Fuck him, he loses, that company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us,” he said to another executive. But there was no looking back. Four months later, Disney announced it would buy Maker Studios, which helped YouTube stars like the gamer PewDiePie sell advertising, for roughly the same $500 million it had considered spending on BuzzFeed.
For Lerer, Peretti’s theatrical decision marked the first break with his protégé. Steinberg was heartbroken. He thought Peretti was out of his mind and realized simultaneously that BuzzFeed was Peretti’s company. The next thing Steinberg did, he vowed, would be entirely his own. He started racking up appearances on CNBC, studying how business news got made. Frank and I were relieved by Peretti’s decision, which meant we could go back to making videos and breaking news. We fully believed that the winds of history were at our backs, and that we’d look down at the pittance Disney offered us one day and laugh. And Frank and I weren’t the only ones who admired Peretti’s balls. In Silicon Valley, that self-effacing boldness and egotism were catnip. And the charts of traffic and revenue pointed ever upward. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, legendarily, had turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! in 2006, defying many of his advisers. Peretti could now go and tell his Disney story to the same people, show off his traffic, take their money, and keep growing.
Peretti’s decision didn’t look like a mistake at first. BuzzFeed and its generation of media—Gawker, Vice, Vox—kept growing, playing central roles in the decade’s culture and news. Even as their revenue numbers began to miss their targets, the growth fueled by Facebook and the sheer sense of destiny kept the hot financial markets open to raise more money, in retrospect, than they’d be worth.
As their businesses weakened and their brands aged, they rode different paths down the hype cycle. Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel destroyed Nick Denton’s Gawker empire. Vice, the best brand and the least credible business of the group, has collapsed under the sheer weight of its own $5.7 billion valuation and appears to be ready to be sold off for parts. Vox has steered carefully through the wreckage and recently raised $100 million on terms similar to the ones it was offering in 2014.
BuzzFeed, which had by then swallowed HuffPost, was the only one to make it to the public markets, riding the very end of the SPAC craze in 2021 to a messy public offering. I’d spent eight years leading a newsroom that, at its best, broke some of the biggest, most serious stories in the world without leaving behind our roots in some of the weirdest parts of the internet. But I was gone by then, writing for The New York Times, where I’d managed to make trouble for various of the other characters in my book, an occupational hazard in writing about media when your sources, targets, and colleagues are the same people. In one of my first pieces, I wrote about Iger’s apparent return to power at Disney as COVID-19 spread— an article that infuriated his successor, Bob Chapek, and led to Iger’s temporary ouster. In one of my last, I wrote about Watson’s Ozy Media, which had gone from fake-it-till-you-make-it start-up tactics to an astounding set of alleged felonies. We covered his arrest this year at my new media outlet, Semafor.