What is Nick Denton up to?
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 53
THE WORST THING WE READ™
Meet the Old Boss
SOMETIMES I'VE GONE months at a time without thinking about my former boss Nick Denton, from Gawker Media. Possibly whole years. While I was working for him, Denton made himself hard to ignore as a boss, both by operating as a mercurial and grandiose manager and by performing the role of a very large public figure in a very small realm of media, a fame that ran from about halfway through the Aughts till about halfway through the 2010s.
Then the billionaire Peter Thiel set out to destroy Gawker through malicious civil litigation, eventually trapping the company in an unfavorable jurisdiction with a hostile judge and jury, and rather than appeal the company's courtroom defeat—which, under the judge's terms, would have required Gawker Media to weather financial ruin—Denton put together a bankruptcy sale and assorted settlements that allowed him to personally escape with his multimillion-dollar fortune and hold on to his palatial SoHo loft condominium. After that he went mostly quiet, and the people involved who hadn't had multimillion-dollar fortunes set about rebuilding their lives and careers, to varying degrees of success.
Sorry, that button was a Dentonian move. Frankness presenting itself as cynicism, or vice versa, the underlying point being to get that money.
About two weeks ago, Denton reappeared, posting things on X.com like "Elon Musk metabolizes danger in a way that even his Silicon Valley peers find superhuman" and getting zero likes or retweets. Then he put up a longer-format post in response to a video captioned "Peter Thiel believes only the elite should be in charge," which he opened with "I mean, Thiel is right, as usual. The Dems have gotten dumber, especially as they’ve pushed out the Jews."
Near dormant group chats came to life. Why was Peter Thiel's most famous victim praising Peter Thiel? Why was the onetime online publishing mogul, creator of the notorious Gawker Big Board to track engagement in real time, tweeting his race-science musings into the void?
The answer, a few days later, took the form of a real estate listing. Denton is trying to sell the condo: a vast high-ceilinged space where bleak, crowded media parties once eddied around the obstruction of an immense suspended sphere made of little styrofoam blocks, an artwork that proclaimed to his non-millionaire guests that here was someone who could afford to annihilate a small bedroom's worth of square footage in Manhattan. He's asking $3.5 million but—frankness and cynicism again!—has openly declared that he means for that number to be low enough to start a bidding war.
That is to say, after years out of the attention racket, Denton is trying to make one more score.
Today, he successfully placed dueling Q&A's in New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, the latter of which prefaced the questions by mentioning the condo, "the promotion of which was his condition for being interviewed."
