BY THE END of 2013, BuzzFeed was having it all. Our traffic hit 130 million unique visitors a month, riding Facebook’s relentless growth. Some of our competitors had begun to imitate everything we did, which mostly amounted to making lists. Others promised to do the same thing we were, but without the embarrassing memes. In Silicon Valley, an ambitious former Goldman Sachs banker named Carlos Watson persuaded an old friend, Laurene Powell Jobs, to finance a website called Ozy that would aim to be a smarter, slicker, more socially conscious BuzzFeed. And in that frothy moment, it seemed to make sense for America’s best media company, and its safest brand, to buy us.
Disney, to the degree it had been aware of BuzzFeed at all, had noticed the rather generous interpretation of fair use of its copyrights in items like “Which Disney Princess Are You?” But Disney was also scrambling to figure out how it fit into a rapidly changing digital world, and in the spring of 2013, Ben Sherwood, the former wunderkind producer turned president of ABC News, which Disney owned, sat with the company’s chief executive, Bob Iger, at the Coral Tree Café in Brentwood and asked him if he’d ever heard of BuzzFeed. Iger said he had but hadn’t really looked deeply into it. Sherwood explained that ABC News, in his view, had fallen dangerously out of sync with the times as corporate media lumbered toward what would be referred to in conference room PowerPoints as “digital transformation.” What the place really needed, he said, was a DNA transfer.
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A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
THE BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET
THE GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE, BORN IN 1937, IS ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, WITH MORE MONEY THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR FRANÇOIS PINAULT. WHERE DID HIS FAMILY FORTUNE COME FROM? THE NAZIS KNOW
GIVE AND LET GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
VANITIES
MAISY STELLA knows how to think outside the box
Party PLANNING
Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
Boys and THEIR TOYS
Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
STRANGER Things
The Democrats' short hot summer of \"weird\"