From Semafor (March 20), a media property founded by a couple guys* who have also extracted a fair bit from the biz.
....MUCH MOREAfter Vice raised $500 million in 2014, its CEO and co-founder Shane Smith remarked to a friend that he’d become “post-economic.”
Brash, decadent, and charming, Smith was the burly, bearded face of Vice Media through its decade of apparent prosperity, from the late aughts until the late 2010s. Vice’s image as a new kind of culture business intertwined with his own image as a big new media mogul: He drove a vintage Rolls Royce, bought a mountain in Costa Rica, and reportedly dropped over $300,000 on a single Las Vegas dinner. He handed out bonuses in the form of fistfuls of (company) cash at a holiday party. He bought the $23 million Santa Monica mansion made famous by the movie Beverly Hills Cop.
But as investors sell off what’s left of Vice, it’s increasingly clear that the lavish spending helped create an illusion of prosperity.
And close watchers of the company continue to wonder: Where has Smith, who remains Vice’s executive chairman, gone? And, more to the point, how much cash did he extract from Vice?....
*The Smiths: Ben, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and media columnist for The New York Times, and Justin, former CEO of Bloomberg Media.
