Nick Denton on Betting Against Elon Musk, Aligning With Peter Thiel, and Selling That SoHo Loft

Nick Denton has always been a distinctly New York character. For 14 years, the Hungarian Brit reigned as the imperiously provocative founder and face of Gawker Media. In addition to Gawker, which he launched in 2002, Denton’s brands have included Jezebel, Valleywag, Gizmodo, and Deadspin. In Gawker’s New New Journalism, the tone was lacerating and subjects often confessional or intrusive; scoops ranged from a sneak peek at not-yet-released iPhone (“This Is Apple’s Next iPhone”) to a link to an unpublished Quentin Tarantino screenplay (“Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino ‘Hateful Eight’ Script”) to celebrity nudes.

Nudes, in the end, led to Gawker’s downfall. In 2016, Gawker published a sex tape of the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. In a subsequent trial, a jury awarded Hogan $140 million, $10 million of which Denton was personally responsible for. (Hogan settled with Gawker for $31 million.) This led to the $135 million sale of Gawker Media to Univision, as well as Denton’s personal bankruptcy (which he later exited after a settlement with Hogan). The benefactor of Hogan’s legal case was far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had held a decade-long grudge after Gawker outed him as gay in 2007.

Which is why it was so surprising to see Denton describe Thiel as “right, as usual” in an X post last week. In an extensive interview, Denton expanded on his thoughts about Thiel (who, he says, “did me a huge favor, to be honest” in forcing the sale of Gawker Media), Bryan Goldberg’s Gawker reboot, his financial stake in Elon Musk, and the sale of his infamous SoHo loft (the promotion of which was his condition for being interviewed).

Vanity Fair: You are the first person in Vanity Fair history to explicitly agree to an interview for the purpose of selling a home.

Nick Denton: Really? Is that true?

Yes, explicitly.

Maybe I’m a little transparent about it, but this is the reason why I would talk. But I’m sure people have done it before plenty of times.

I’m sure.

What’s your background, anyway?

I actually interned at Gawker in 2008, and attended a party at your loft when I worked at Esquire. Do any parties stand out?

There was one at the peak of digital media—maybe not the peak of the boom, but as it was really gathering steam—and it was like anybody who was anybody was there. I think it was Bill Keller from the Times, and then Arianna [Huffington]. In some ways it feels like it was maybe one of the last Manhattan media scenes. You’re probably going to tell me that there is one. It’s awesome and super hot, and I actually just don’t know about it.

I think it’s Dimes Square.

Oh, it’s still Dimes Square?

Well, now that they’re taking away outdoor dining, apparently not, but I don’t know what the new one is. I guess the media history is a sweetener for anybody who is thinking of buying your place.

I actually don’t think so. Right now, I think people are looking for the family apartment or the home or safe haven in a troubled world, just being in the middle of the action. Balthazar is still Balthazar. You get your croissants in the morning from Balthazar Bakery. I go over in my sliders; I don’t even put my shoes on. I mean, it’s literally 100 paces down the stairs, across the road. In those morning hours, it still feels a little village-like. Some people talk about, “I’ll leave America if Trump gets elected,” and I guess I actually do, don’t I?

You and Ellen, you’re walking the walk.

Ellen?

Ellen DeGeneres.

Oh, Ellen DeGeneres, she left? I didn’t know that. We are very, very reluctant sellers. My husband, Derrence [Washington], is a supremely reluctant seller. I really had to throw everything in there. He’s getting a G-wagon. We’ve negotiated the precise number of trips to Mykonos.

What’s the number?

Oh, it’s basically two holidays in Mykonos a year, one holiday in Brazil, and then six weekends in Barcelona. And we got a nice little beautiful house in the Buda Hills [in Budapest, Hungary], which is kind of actually where my mom always wanted to live. Basically, the place we lived in London was her consolation for not being in the Buda Hills. She was in the London hills in Hampstead. So it sort of feels like it’s come full circle for me. Budapest is where I started my journalistic career in ’89 with the fall of the Soviet Union, and now I’m going to be around for the withdrawal of America from Western Europe. Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, has this great line, which is like, “How absurd it is that 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for help dealing with 140 million Russians who can’t even handle 50 million Ukrainians?” People see more clearly now. They see more clearly just the effects of having been so dependent on America, and that America has become such an erratic ally. I was like, “This is divorce [between Europe and America]. I think Europeans need to go home. Americans need to go home too.” So we’re going home and I’m going home to Budapest.

So your marriage to the erratic partner of America has become untenable.

Oh, I thought you were talking about my partner, [Derrence].

No.

He’s the opposite of that. Derrence is about as American as they come. His anthem is Beyoncé riding in on a white horse chased by American cars and American flags everywhere. He’s a Texan. And not an erratic Texan.

Not a gun Texan.

No, he’s into the guns. Totally into guns.

Do you have a gun in your loft?

All Texans are into guns. I don’t think you can get them in New York. Super complicated. There’s a baseball bat at the front. That’s it.

So you mentioned over email that one of the things that’s causing you to leave is you’re concerned about being a green card holder and being a protected permanent resident of the country.

I wouldn’t say that’s the main…I mean, the main reason is it’s time to go home.

For a long time, Europeans would come over to the States to work in technology, to work in media, [like] Emma Tucker, the Wall Street Journal journalist, who I knew both from college and from the Financial Times…

And it’s been a transatlantic shuttle with probably more Europeans coming over to New York than Americans going the other way. But if you were ambitious as a European and you were in media, you’d go to New York, and if you were ambitious in technology as I was, you’d go to Silicon Valley. The AI companies are full of European technologists. So the US was the imperial capital. And I don’t think you really want us anymore.

Well, I do.

It doesn’t feel like it. I know you do, and I know New York does, but it doesn’t really feel like America really values the relationship with Europe like it used to. Don’t you think that’s true?

I think so, yeah. There are obviously certain classes of Europeans that will always be fine. White British people.

Oh, they’re still an accepted part of the master race?

I think white supremacists are still okay with them.

There’s a certain kind of contempt for Europe for being weak and poor. I know the GDP stats show that America is—whatever, is it 30% now the gap between European GDP per head and the US GDP per head? That even the richest European countries are basically about the level of Mississippi or something like that, but I don’t see it in the reality. Southern Europeans live about five years longer.

If you walk around London, London feels richer than New York—new construction and cool new buildings and the old buildings look well-maintained and the roads are paved. And London isn’t even the slickest city. We lived in Zurich during Trump One, and Zurich is immaculate. This is getting back to get back to the apartment, but the dollar looks pretty inflated to me. When I’m in New York, I feel poor spending an enormous amount of money. If you go to Colombia or Brazil or Hungary or Greece with your dollars, you feel like a king. You can take your dollars and you convert them into euros and you can buy the best apartment in the damn city.

So is that why you’re actually selling now? You tried to sell your place in 2016 and—

No, I didn’t try to sell it. That was all part of the legal campaign against Gawker. So they were trying to make me sell it.

Wasn’t it listed?

It never went on the market, so it never sold.

Speaking of that time, I was surprised to see you say something like, “As he often is, Peter Thiel is right about something.”

I’m really not that partisan. I liked Elon Musk until earlier this year or late last year, or something like that. I respected him as somebody who had done a lot. I’m into technology, I’m into the future, and somebody who builds electric cars, reusable rockets, transforms space travel, provides internet globally, I’m going to respect them. Our son’s not named after him, don’t stress, but our son’s middle name is Elon. It’s a cool name. But no, I don’t hate those guys, and I think it’s unwise to dismiss them. They’re smart people. They’re making some mistakes now.

I’ve got a huge put [an option that gains value if the stock depreciates] on Musk, which I could lose entirely if he turns it [Tesla] around. But I don’t see him focusing on Tesla. Why isn’t he at the factory? Where are his robots? They haven’t been seen recently. Meanwhile, the Chinese robots are doing backflips, and his robot last seen was shuffling around like Joe Biden on a bad day.

So you’re betting that Tesla stock will go down?

I have my private company, which is timeline generation. It’s using dialogue with AIs to answer questions like, “Okay, so [Chinese electric and hybrid automobile manufacturer] BYD did twice the sales of Tesla last year [inclusive of hybrid sales], and now Tesla’s in trouble in the European markets because of politics, and sales have collapsed in various European countries. Okay, so let’s play this forward. What are the sales going to be like in 2030?” And I usually get an answer of like, “Okay. Well, BYD is going to be 10 times the size of Tesla in 2030,” and then you look at the valuations, and Tesla was worth nearly 10 times more than BYD. So that doesn’t add up to me. Putting my financial analyst hat on, it just does not add up. So I put a big put on Tesla. Am I still allowed to? I forget. Have they banned this yet, betting against Musk? I guess they will at some point. It would probably be defined as terrorism or something like that.

The Chinese robots are doing backflips, and his robot last seen was shuffling around like Joe Biden on a bad day.

Maybe after this interview comes out.

I got myself in trouble again. I’m always doing that. All I’m trying to do is I report the world as I see it and then make decisions based on how I see the world. That’s all I’m trying to do, and people seem to react so badly to that. Did you see this thing by Michael Cembalest? To my mind, this is the most radical statement of our science. “The stock market is unique. It cannot be indicted, arrested, or deported. It cannot be intimidated, threatened, or bullied. It has no gender, ethnicity, or religion. It cannot be fired, furloughed, or defunded. It cannot be primaried before the next midterm elections and it cannot be seized, nationalized, or invaded. It’s the ultimate voting machine, reflecting prospects for earnings growth, stability, liquidity, inflation, taxation, and predictable rule of law.” This guy is my hero now. I have this quote basically as my screensaver. This is true radicalism. I hate the vandalism, the burning of Tesla cars and showrooms. I think it’s a terrible own goal. It’s idiotic. Please stop, whoever’s doing it. If you have a view, make your view known in the market. That’s what I’m doing.

I guess you can vote with your money. And with where you choose to be. Are you worried at all about the politics in Hungary?

Less so. “What about the geopolitical risk?” Well, what about your geopolitical risk? [Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán, he talks, but in practice…I mean, in practice, he clamps down on the Nazis real hard. Frankly, as a Jew in New York, you’re sort of on the side from both left and right. The left don’t like you because you’re a capitalist because you’ve got money or even because you believe in the power of the market as I do. No leftist is going to like that quote that I just read you from Cembalest—the idea that this is the ultimate form of protest, to buy a put. During the protests in 2020 when it turned into looting and the cops disappeared, there was no sympathy from the left for those bougie SoHo loft dwellers, many of whom happened to be Jewish.

You know who Radek Sikorski is?

No.

Okay, so he’s kind of like a centrist conservative Polish politician. He’s married to Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. He might actually be the ultimate transatlantic guy. He’s been really trying to keep America and Europe [together], and then Musk says, “Be quiet, little man.” Do you remember that one?

That was rough.

I know it’s hard to remember all of the insults, except I do.

You do? It’s so funny that you remember all the insults, but you’re like, “I respect Peter Thiel. He is right about a lot of stuff.”

Well, he is not doing the insults. I suspect that he’s actually not cool with it. [Thiel’s AI company] Palantir depends on European contracts. It depends on NATO, depends on the Atlantic Alliance. If you actually look at what they’ve been saying and what [Palmer Luckey’s defense company] Anduril has been saying, so that side of the right. The tech right is not one monolith at all. And I think [Vice President JD] Vance has kind of gone off the reservation a bit. I don’t think they’re cool with Vance, his aggressive berating of important NATO allies. I haven’t seen the divide yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s there. Are you surprised that I’m moderate?

I’m surprised that you seem to be defending somebody who financed a lawsuit against you and bankrupted you.

I’m not defending him. I’m just appreciating him. I’m evaluating him, and actually I think he’s actually smart enough to be keeping his distance from all this mess. He hasn’t been that involved. He hasn’t been photographed. I don’t think he was there at the inauguration. He said last year that he wasn’t involving himself in this cycle, because he’s a smart guy. Curtis Yarvin, who is a good friend [of Thiel’s, Denton clarifies, adding, “I think he is smart. And I follow him.”] and a philosopher, doesn’t seem to have any particular faith that the administration’s policy is going to work out. The cuts seem quite arbitrary and spastic. Cutting down the federal government to size is not like cutting down X to size. Musk succeeded in cutting down X to size. What, he cut 80% of the staff, and still functions?

It’s still technically functioning.

Yeah, it doesn’t break down that often. And the valuation is back up at $40 billion, or whatever it is. I’m not quite sure how or why, but it was a pretty smart move of his. He certainly gained a huge amount of political power in doing that. I don’t know whether that’s been good for America or for Musk himself, because I mean, he’s kind of poisoned himself on X. My line is that Musk did not take over Twitter, Twitter took over Musk.

I don’t know what his personality was like before. I’ve heard of him contacting journalists and complaining.

I looked at that complaint email he sent me in 2007 [about a Valleywag story], and it was remarkable for being so long. It must’ve taken him hours to write. I don’t think I even read the whole thing. But he wasn’t mad. I heard a story from somebody who’s a good friend of his, and he was a normal guy up until pretty recently, and 2017, I think he was invited to see Trump and he really didn’t want to go. He wasn’t into that. Sure, he’s not a classic party-line Democrat, but he was probably pretty centrist. But since he’s owned X, or X has owned him, he has spiraled. I put on that big put that weekend after he kind of got kneecapped. He had that argument with the transport secretary and with Rubio, and then Trump comes out and says, “Okay, we’re going to do things differently now. It’s going to be a scalpel and not a chain saw.” Do you remember that?

I do remember that.

X is running the show. And Musk is not running the show. Did you see that Elephant Graveyard video?

No.

It’s like a samizdat that’s circulating around, and basically it’s talking about how Joe Rogan went crazy because he and his podcast guests and his audience, they’re basically all breathing in each other’s fumes, and it’s led him in a very dark direction.

I recognized that, oh, okay, now it’s kind of the same thing that’s happening to Musk at X. People say, “Oh, Musk has gotten stupider.” He’s clearly an extremely bright guy, an amazing engineer and probably knows more about manufacturing than anybody else in the United States. You’ve got to just give him that. Anyone who calls him stupid, that’s just stupid. I think that’s fair to say that he’s gotten dumber over time because basically he’s being brought down to the level of the nut gallery that he’s playing to on Twitter. And the other thing I recognized was Gawker from, maybe it was 2011 to 2015, which was kind of the period of Gawker derangement.

What do you mean?

I know Max Read. He’s a very intelligent person, and he’s a very smart writer. I read his Substack and his Read Max Substack, and he’s really good, but the fact that he could put out that piece about the Condé Nast CFO [the executive no longer works for Conde Nast, which owns Vanity Fair] in 2015, which is the worst piece that I think Gawker ever did. It’s worse than the Hogan piece. I mean, I was ashamed of not the Hogan article, but I was ashamed of the Hogan video. But the 2015 story of the CFO of Condé Nast, that was the moment that I got the machine gun out and fired half the staff of the site, because somehow collectively together with the commenters and especially together with their peers on Twitter, they had collectively gotten dumber and more deranged. That was the story with which they basically, together like lemmings, went off the edge of the cliff.

And [when I saw the Elephant Graveyard video] that’s when I put on the big Musk put. That was totally my ah-ha moment, because I absolutely recognized that pattern, and I recognized how hard it is once you’ve been captured by your audience. Once you’ve been captured by your audience, it’s very hard to pull back. What are you going to do? You going to fire your audience?

How are your personal finances compared to what they were before the bankruptcy?

Oh. I mean, I never had any liquid funds when I was at Gawker. Basically everything went back into the business.

But you owned Gawker.

Well, I owned Gawker, but I had stock in this company that wasn’t on the public markets. I couldn’t sell my stock. I had an apartment. I made some money out of a couple of previous transactions. Look, Peter Thiel did me a huge favor, to be honest. I don’t think he saw that at the time, but it forced the sale of Gawker Media. It provided a pretext to close Gawker down, which I needed to do anyway. And I sold the business for $135 million. There were lawyers fees to pay, and then Peter Thiel. What did Hogan get? 20 or 30, or something like that? I think 30. [Ed note: $31 million.] So yeah, it would’ve been nicer not to have had to go through that ugly process, but the fact is that was probably the peak of valuation for the digital media companies around then. So just in terms of timing, in retrospect, I’d rather be me than [Buzzfeed co-founder] Jonah Peretti.

Would you rather be you than Bryan Goldberg [who purchased Gawker in 2018, attempted and aborted a reboot in 2019, relaunched in 2021, and shuttered the site in 2023]?

Bryan Goldberg. You know what? The thing I hated most about that Gawker retread was that when I did Gawker, I was very proud of the fact that I never ever gave them a list.

Like a list of people writers couldn’t touch?

Yes, and it was very uncomfortable for me, and it probably meant that I didn’t become friends with people I could have become friends with. Because if anything, the Gawker lot, they went after people who were my friends just to prove how independent they were.

Like who?

Marc Andreessen is one of those people. I know now for the left, he’s kind of politically toxic, and he supported Trump last time and all that, but when I did Valleywag, he was a very good source. I’m an insider-outsider journalist. I like to be inside enough to know what’s going on and outside enough to be a little bit detached from it so I can kind of analyze it dispassionately. So that’s just who I am. And when I did Valleywag, I dealt with them all. I wasn’t taking pot shots from on the other side of the wall. I’d work with them and they could talk off the record with me, and I’d use some stuff and I wouldn’t use other stuff, and you could basically deal with me.

And then Sam Biddle. He’s a very good journalist, but I remember really clearly having a conversation with him saying, “You do know that Andreessen is the source of a lot of stories you talk about? So if you really want to know what’s going on, you have to stay at least on reasonable terms with Andreessen. Doesn’t mean you can’t do any critical stories, but there has to be a little bit of a give and take, and they can’t all be critical. It would be stupid for them to be all critical anyway, because he funds a third of the interesting companies in Silicon Valley. So it can’t all be ‘evil.’” And he was like, “No, not ‘source.’ ‘Target.’” Not even a moment’s thought about it. That was not a friendship at all, but I would’ve probably quite liked to have kept some kind of channel open with people like that. [Biddle responds to VF: “I definitely remember this conversation; I actually think about it a lot. We were just gearing up to restart Valleywag. My recollection is that Nick, as someone who had been deeply steeped in this kind of Valley reporting, brought it up as a choice I was going to have to make: Did I want a VC like Andreessen as a source for, or subject of, Valleywag? I don’t remember if I used the word ‘target’ or not but choosing the latter path was clear to me. I didn’t want to ever worry about an Andreessen not responding to my texts.]

[Tech titans are] totally the most interesting people in America. They’re still the most interesting people in America. You laugh, but I don’t know why you’re laughing, because they’re clearly the most interesting people in America. Anybody who looks at America from the outside, will hone in on those guys. I’ve got friends who are doing media newsletters now in Manhattan. The Valley guys are media figures. They’re out in the media, they’re talking all the time, these companies depend on the magic, the memes, the image that is created around them. They care deeply about the media.

I don’t see how you can cover the media without covering them. It’s absurd. Well, you’re covering these little minnows that mean nothing in New York. It’s provincial, frankly. It’s provincial. I’m not interested in a bunch of writers just talking to each other.

I like gossip that’s more personal. I understand that you like gossip that’s more about power.

Yeah, that is totally it. I love that gossip, and that gossip actually got me into a lot of trouble. The story that Peter Thiel really didn’t like—not the story that he said he didn’t like—but the story that he really didn’t like was another story that I did saying basically that the whole kind of PayPal official story of endless success, success after success after success, perfect copybook personal histories, [wasn’t correct]. These startups are messy. They’re always messy. Every single thing I’ve ever done has been messy. It’s just the way it goes. Elon Musk was basically eased out of PayPal. He and Peter Thiel, it’s in their interest and they have been allies, and I guess at some point they would’ve made up and put that behind them, but there was a staff revolt against Musk at PayPal after the merger between them. So them being business partners, that wasn’t a perfectly clean story.

So you’re saying Thiel funded the lawsuit because of that story, not the outing story?

The outing story was basically one that he promoted mainly to the New York Times, because that was something that was going to resonate rather more with them than, for instance, him being annoyed about the reporting on his Roth IRA tax avoidance scheme. Who do you think he is? He cares about money. He cares about power. It’s the power gossip that bothers him, not the little personal stuff. I mean, look, he doesn’t like personal stuff either. At least for Musk, now is the time of reckoning. Peter Thiel is wise enough to stay in the shadows, let other people do his talking. And now Musk is maybe the most public man in the history of the world, and his fall could be the most dramatic fall of anybody in human history, and I can’t think of anything that comes close to this. (Thiel did not immediately respond to VF.)

Well, he hasn’t fallen yet.

From his peak he’s fallen quite a long way. And the White House is afraid to poll his numbers because I assume they’re awful and in the toilet, and he’s now a weight dragging down Trump. People have made adjustments to the battery technology of BYD being superior to that of Tesla now, and you’ve had the stories about the metal panels coming off the Cybertruck, then there’s obviously the political impact on sales and the blue cities and then liberal European countries, that people are never going to be buying Teslas ever again. The brand damage has been kind of immense there.

But there are still some parts of the story: the Optimus is actually probably the biggest part of the growth story that remains, which is that Tesla is not just a car company. It’s going to be America’s leading robot company, and the robot market is going to be a gigantic, gigantic market. So that part of the story is still in the valuation. I don’t know where [the stock] closed today. Is it like 240, or something like that? I mean, it was 380 when I wanted to put the put on. I’m doing very nicely so far.

It’s 236 right now.

I try not to look at it too much because my portfolio goes up by hundreds of thousands, and then down by hundreds of thousands. I’m getting a little bit dizzy.

Do you own a Tesla?

No, but Derrence was a huge Cybertruck fan, and I’ve seen the Cybertruck when it was riding around in Manhattan and all the delivery guys and the supers, everyone’s craning to look at it. I thought it was a little bit of a teenage design, but it’s original. It’s cool. I think [Musk is] seriously going to land on Mars, I think that’s his escape route. Coming from that guy, it’s like a Mars rover going down a Manhattan street, and that’s cool. I don’t care what you think about him now, but that was cool.

If he’s crapping out, how’s he going to wind up on Mars? Wouldn’t that mean that he has succeeded?

This is juicy financial gossip: I heard secondhand from a private investor in SpaceX who sold out all of their stock because on some tour, they’d be talking with employees, and the employees had said that basically Musk had been diverting resources from, I think, the satellite launches (which is profitable) to a Mars launch (which is not profitable but which is what he wants to do). Okay—…

I know you have to go. One more question. Have you willingly or unwillingly learned anything about Graydon Carter’s memoir?

Oh, he’s got one coming out?

So I guess not.

No, I guess not. Sorry. I mean, as you can probably tell my interests have… I’ve never really been into the inside media stuff that much. You know what? He once took me out for lunch and he gave me some very good advice, which is basically if you’re enfant terrible… I forget which age it was. I think I was still at enfant terrible at 40, but I think he was basically warning me, it’s not a good look still to be an enfant terrible at 50.

Geriatric enfant terrible.

Which I think is very good advice. He was an enfant terrible and definitely kind of matured into a more comfortable figure.

Good luck with the sale.

Thank you very much.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.