The Onion’s Ben Collins Knows How to Save Media

What’s the biggest difference between Elon Musk and the CEO of The Onion? “I know I’m not funny—and he has no idea,” says Ben Collins, the former NBC News reporter who bought the satirical newspaper with Twilio founder Jeff Lawson last year. In the 12 months since, The Onion has reached new comic heights—see: viral headlines like “Nation Can’t Believe It on Harvard’s Side”—while increasing its cultural footprint.

But again, Collins says, that’s because he’s been smart enough to leave the actual comedy to the experts. “There are definitely people who would come in here and just be like, ‘I’m the funniest man in the world. Let’s go attack trans people or something. That would be their version of what satire is. Just like, for example, the song ‘The Reason’ by Hoobastank is also technically music, it is not the kind of music that I want to listen to.”

Instead, Collins has focused on getting The Onion the resources it so desperately needed, as well as pruning back the bullshit so the paper’s content can shine. “We took this thing that was dying a slow internet heat death and turned it into a real newspaper and much bigger business,” he exclusively tells Vanity Fair. “There was a boner-pill ad shawl that covered all of our content, and you just couldn’t read it. We got rid of all of it. We reset revenue to zero for a month or two while we figured out how to make and ship a paper to tens of thousands of people.”

Collins has expanded the staff from 14 employees to 27; he anticipates hiring eight more by the end of the year. He’s invested resources into video content, relaunching parody television news network “ONN” (Onion News Network) on YouTube and—in a shocking move for any online publication in this day and age—he’s also brought back The Onion’s print arm, which initially folded in 2013.

“I’m not saying every newspaper should get back and print immediately. The New York Observer, or whatever the fuck, I don’t think it would behoove them to start doing this shit,” he says. “But we can be super funny in print, and people like getting a nice thing in the mail.” Although he’s quick to claim that, in some ways, he’s just been lucky, Collins also has a game plan for building a thriving 21st-century media brand that he’s more than happy to share with other publications—eventually. “We want to help other people get into print soon,” he says. “That’s our plan too. It can’t just be us.”

In a declining industry where everyone is obsessed with doing more with less, Collins’s Onion is legitimately growing. “It’s like a miracle,” he says. “I wish the media didn’t have to collapse for people to have to look at us as a model for making money and being successful, but here we are.”

Below, Collins sits for a long chat about leaving NBC News after feuding with Elon Musk, his romantic relationship with aspiring politician Kat Abughazaleh, the status of The Onion’s attempt to purchase InfoWars, and so much more.

Vanity Fair: You were a reporter at NBC News before becoming CEO of The Onion. What was that transition like for you?

Ben Collins: I used to be a disinformation reporter. I was covering all these bad guys. There was a flip that switched a couple of years ago where I started seeing my bosses thinking, like, Uh oh, he’s going to continue to report on Elon Musk? This is not a great thing. Everyone could see them shaking their collars out. They were like, The fascism’s coming, and he’s still doing this? So it was a weird and awkward last year at my job.

I think I have some modicum of social skills. I can read the room. I know when I’m not welcome there anymore.

Did you feel that they were doing anything to impede your actual journalism?

Oh, dude. I got suspended for being too mean to Elon Musk. And by the way, it was for basically just reporting on him. It was not anything crazy.

After that, I realized my time on this peacock is short. When I saw The Onion was for sale, I realized that maybe I didn’t have to live my entire life in this doldrumescent hell. I started chasing this thing, and we really did save it from what we would now call AI death. Or the throes of a decabillionaire who is worried about white genocide.

Elon Musk is a great character because you can’t punch down on him. Are you ever worried about punching down?

We’re constantly worried about that. Good comedy, in my opinion, is dissecting power. It’s dissecting power in our own personal lives and power in everything else.

I think we are wholly aware of the expectation of cruelty right now in comedy. Zagging is actually helpful, because that shit doesn’t last. You look back through time, 23 years ago, and whoever they decided to pick on, it’s like, Ugh, yuck. When you look back at comedy that worked, it’s like, Who are the people trying to actively oppress us? And what are the things that are taken as true as fact by elites and by people in power that are just obviously not the case? The good comedy is the stuff that lives in that dissonance.

There are people here who really do want to hold power to account, and the best way to do that is by making fun of ’em. There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on.

Do you have any influence on the editorial side of The Onion?

I don’t touch it. I don’t go in that room at all. I let them do what they want. The only thing I do is when they have something that I know is a banger, I’m like, Where do we put this thing? Do we put it on the streets? We’ve wheatpasted stuff, made it graffiti in real life. And when there is a psychopath’s company available for sale in a bankruptcy process, we do try to purchase it.

You did try to play the ultimate joke on Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones by buying his media platform Infowars at auction, but a judge blocked the sale. What’s the status of The Onion purchasing Infowars?

It’s still up in the air. We still want it at present. It is in literal legal limbo. Alex Jones is nothing if not a person who can harangue the court until his lifespan winds up shorter than him receiving justice. [Laughs.] He’s like the Michael Jordan of harassing the American legal system. So he never faces consequences.

We always knew it was going to be bad, but we didn’t think we would be ruled the winner of it and have that taken away—have a judge reverse months of rulings. It’s an unprecedented situation. If you talk to any lawyer, it’s never happened before. Everyone’s just sort of trying to figure out what happens next—and we are part of those people.

We are optimistic we’re still going to end up with it eventually, but we don’t know when eventually is. That’s the issue.

What was the impact of trying to buy InfoWars?

The service that we did there, I think, was real. So many people reached out to us who had lost their kids in school shootings. As you know, in America, that’s thousands more people than there should be. There shouldn’t be one. They’ve reached out to us and just said, “Thank you for even giving us this glimmer of hope for a minute.” It was a shot across the bow that decency could potentially prevail. We gave people a permission structure to think that happiness is achievable, and that’s why we’re not going to stop fighting for it.

We still have people on hand, ready to go if we pull it off. And I can’t wait to show you guys what we have, because it’s fucking funny.

People on both sides of the political spectrum have called President Trump funny. Do you think Donald Trump is funny?

Not on purpose. I mean, he’s funny in the way that, I don’t know…you know how cats are sometimes scared of cucumbers and jump and run away? That kind of thing. His inability to comprehend reality is funny, but that’s not funny.

He also never laughs. Probably twice a week I laugh so hard I cry—probably because I work here. I’ve never seen him uncontrollably laugh in my life. And it is so antithetical to what I think being a human being is. That’s why we’re here, to have a nice time. It explains so much about him. He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny. I think those are two different things. Unless he’s fucking up—unless he’s mispronouncing something or not understanding something fully—when people say he’s funny, it’s usually him being cruel to somebody.

While we’re on the subject of political figures—did you see Bill de Blasio quoting the classic Onion headline “Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?”

Yes, I did. It is so great. It is one of my favorite headlines of all time, and it’s because the city can just not elect a normal guy. It’s just impossible.

Dude—I met [NYC mayoral candidate] Zohran [Mamdani] on Saturday out of the blue. Everybody lobbies The Onion about what we should be doing, obviously, and everyone’s right. He was like, “You guys got to hammer [Andrew] Cuomo.” I was like, “I can’t tell the room to go after a mayor of New York City.” Like, what the fuck? I can’t go to the room and just be like, “Now you’re going after this guy.” He literally just turns to me, he goes, “Well, well, well—not so easy to find a mayor who doesn’t suck shit, huh?” I was like, “Well, you got me, dude. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

I’m sure the room will naturally come to its conclusions about which of these candidates is a human being. But that’s just an eternal and iconic headline. And it is true. It is seemingly impossible for New York City to elect a regular person. It’s crazy that Bill de Blasio was probably the closest.

Now that you’re CEO of The Onion, you’re more of a public figure. How have you been handling the response to your romantic relationship with Kat Abughazaleh, the journalist and social media influencer who recently announced a run for US Congress in Illinois?

I mean, it’s weird. I’ve never publicly dated anybody. My girlfriend came to me earlier this year and was like, “I don’t really feel represented on the planet earth anymore and I don’t know what to do about it. And I’m thinking about running for Congress.”

I don’t know. I tried my whole life to be a decent and good person, especially to my friends and family and my partners. I was like, “Yeah, let’s fucking go.” Kat is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. She has an ability to reach people on their level that I’ve never met in another person at all. And I’m not going to say, “I’m not just saying this because this is my girlfriend.” Of course I’m saying this because she’s my girlfriend. What fucking idiot would not say that, right? But I also truly, genuinely believe it. So I was like, “All right, what can I do to help?” What does a decent person do in this moment to make it so she can provide the good that she provides to the world?

You saw her launch video, right? It was, like, fucking “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. You could hear the glass breaking. This girl’s got the fucking juice. And, colloquially, I knew she had the sauce, but I did not know until that moment that she had the juice. I’m fucking emotional. I was so just genuinely proud of her, and it’s weird that we sit at home every night and watch Jeopardy! and look at our cats’ dumb faces.

What would you say to people who might be worried about your ability to cover the news objectively because of your relationship?

There’s a couple of things here. One, I just don’t go in that room and tell them what to do. I’ve never touched Onion copy. I just do businessy stuff.

But also, until the day [Kat] launched that video, she was a reporter. She was a researcher. She was a journalist. And I think a terrible rule is that journalists should not seek higher office when they believe that it is important to do so. One of the highest ranking people in the Canadian government is a former journalist who covered corruption in the far right. It would be a terrible rule to say those people can’t run for office. It’s a fucking terrible idea.

Candidly, when I put in my notice [at NBC], I had talked through it with her. I was like, “Look, I’m going to go write a book and I’m not going to have a steady income for…I don’t even know.” She was like, “All right, we’ll figure it out. We’ll work off mine and you can try to get some freelance stuff in the meantime.” When it came to me upending my life for my bullshit, she was totally down. And it turned out to not be bullshit at all. It worked out great for me. When she wants to upend her life for something that’s real and important and something that really only she can or has done, it would be ghoulish behavior to be like, “No, actually. Excuse me. Only I get to chase my dreams, and only I get to do the thing that I know I’m good at and can help a lot of people.” What kind of person would that be? So that’s part of it too.

Obviously, The Onion will do nothing from now on but run articles about how cool my girlfriend is. [Laughs.] It’s the number one thing that readership wants and expects from us. It’s identical to Jeff Bezos. I am also going to send her into space, and everyone at my paper has to cover it as if it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened.

What’s your take on the state of comedy these days?

Everything’s so diffuse. Things that are bad are worse than ever. And things that are good, I think, are better than ever.

I would even say the commercial comedy is pretty good. I like Nate Bargatze. I think he’s good. And I think there are people taking insane risks, like Nathan Fielder, who is just a remarkable figure. There’s a lot of good.

And also, the dumb, Bluesky-centric joke stuff is good. The democratization of comedy is good and bad as well. I’ve seen TikToks and YouTube shorts and shit like that that are fucking instant classics. They’re really good. And then there’s the bad. You know what the bad is: guys with tiny mustaches and round faces doing the same exact fucking thing. God bless ’em, but they are not fucking funny. They seem to have more purchase among people with billions of dollars than I think is acceptable.

We always go through phases like this, and they’re very short. The ’80s went through an Andrew Dice Clay moment, and the ’90s went through a similar kind of thing. “I’m just a beer-drinking man. What is it with those immigrants?” That shit. There’s fucking four jokes, and they make them over and over again, and then two years goes by and nobody wants to deal with it anymore. And I feel like we’re nearing the end of those two years—in part because this time, the accelerated death of it is because they’re attached to a fascist government that no one likes. They quite literally did roasts on his behalf. This is a natural endpoint.

For a comedy publication, The Onion is unafraid to tackle hot-button issues, like the conflict in Gaza. How do you handle thornier issues? Is anything off-limits?

No. They’re allowed to go after whatever they want to, and they do. Nilay Patel at The Verge once said that The Onion’s motto is basically, “Don’t kill people.” And that is correct. That is basically what it is. We inherently distrust politicians, but it really comes down to “stop killing people.” Once that starts to inform the editorial worldview, it makes a lot more sense, right? It gives them a pretty clear moral clarity on things like Gaza and on things like trans rights, because there are clear moral panics and government bullshit happening around both. We don’t tell them not to do anything. We let them absolutely go for it.

It’s so interesting that an outlet that encourages its writers to speak truth to power is flourishing in a media industry where everything else seems to be in decline.

I want that to be a lesson to people. Kowtowing to power—if your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that. It does nothing for you to pull a punch at this moment. You have to be able to stand up for a baseline of humanity. That’s what we do here. And I’m glad to tell you that they never blinked. They never thought twice about it. They just always were like, “All right, well, let’s keep doing what we do here.”

What does the future of The Onion look like?

I say this all the time around here now, but the world’s our canvas now. Where can we show up in ways that make it so people think that good things are technically possible? Where do we show up where people are, and where do we show up where people don’t even know we could show up? That is my goal for the next few months. .We’re going to be doing that in various different places. It requires money to do it—so if you don’t subscribe to The Onion, I will fucking kill you. Tell your readers that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.