CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss gave a glowing tribute to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel on Thursday as she presented him with a media industry award in Berlin.
Weiss handed Thiel the 2026 Axel Springer Award, which honors entrepreneurs and thinkers who have shaped digital transformation, and she opened her nearly 11-minute speech with a joke about the tech billionaire’s well-publicized fascination with the biblical antichrist, reported Status.
“I want to begin tonight by thanking you all for attending my lecture on the antichrist,” Weiss said. “For all the media journalists who are watching this or poring over this transcript, that was a joke. I only talk about the antichrist at my secret weekly meeting supervised by the Mossad in Tel Aviv.”
Past winners of the award include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Axel Springer, run by CEO Mathias Döpfner, owns Politico, Business Insider and Morning Brew in the United States.
Weiss went on to praise Thiel, a German-born U.S. citizen raised in South Africa who is prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, as the embodiment of “the quintessential American spirit: heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent.”
Weiss praised Thiel’s fellowship, which pays young people to skip college, and quoted former New York Times columnist Ross Douthat – whom she hired away for “60 Minutes” – calling Thiel “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the past 20 years.”
“He sees things before the rest of us do,” Weiss said. “He knows what’s coming and seems consistently to get there first.”
The choice of Thiel drew protests from some Axel Springer employees, largely over his role in the demise of Gawker. Thiel secretly bankrolled the invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that ended in a $140 million verdict and drove the outlet into bankruptcy.
Weiss acknowledged that she and Thiel disagree about the press, which she called “an instrument of liberty and as an engine of progress that deserves to be invested in and perfected.”
“To the extent Peter and I disagree on this, I’m going to consider it a victory for my side of the argument that he’s here tonight receiving an award from an institution that’s become synonymous with freedom of the press,” she said.
Billionaire David Ellison named Weiss, founder of The Free Press, to lead CBS News last year despite her lack of broadcast experience. Critics have accused her of steering the network to the right.
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