From Semafor, April 14:
The Scoop
The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor, Pierre Omidyar, decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization. Now spun off from Omidyar’s First Look Media, The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March....***....The Intercept’s CEO, Annie Chabel, told Semafor in an interview this week that those projections were a worst-case scenario, and that the Intercept had a “stretch revenue goal that would allow us to continue into a longer horizon.”The Intercept was born a decade ago in a very different moment for media and politics. Two of its founders, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked surveillance files in 2013, which reshaped how Americans thought about the government and their privacy. Omidyar, a leftish billionaire with no known appetite for political combat, rapidly pledged deep support for an organization that would combine that anti-establishment mission with a combative form of online journalism born out of Gawker Media.
A decade later, American politics are almost unrecognizable. Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right. Liberal donors have lost their taste for party infighting as the specter of Donald Trump looms, while voices further left are promising to punish Joe Biden over his response to Gaza....
....MUCH MORE
What a long strange trip. Along the way we got to know Omidyar and that he took time out to help fund the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine:PayPal Billionaire Pierre Omidyar Is Very Creepy
Omidyar, along with Glenn Greenwald founded The Intercept to much hoopla. Some links in March 7's "Mystery Solved: Left-Wing Billionaire Pierre Omidyar Bankrolls Shadowy Anti-Musk Group" (EBAY; TSLA):
I don't know if I'd label Omidyar left-wing so much as power-mad/control freak.
Before, during and after Ukraine's 2014 Maidan coup he was funding neo-Nazis in Mariupol and their Galician base, Lviv.
From Elliott Management-backed (Paul Singer) Washington Free Beacon, February 21:
Omidyar money behind organizations pushing corporate boycott of Twitter
The left-wing billionaire and media donor Pierre Omidyar is behind the dark-money group that has kept its donors secret for nearly a year and is leading a corporate boycott campaign against Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Omidyar, the eBay founder and financial backer of the Intercept and ProPublica, donated $509,500 to Accountable Tech in 2021 and 2022, according to a recently updated list of grants disclosed by Omidyar's foundation. Omidyar also gave $2 million to at least six other organizations that targeted Musk, criticizing him in letters and op-eds as "uniquely ill-suited for the job of running a social media platform" and warning that he would turn Twitter into a "free-for-all of hate and harassment."
The news reveals one of the primary forces behind the anti-Musk campaign. Accountable Tech has been dodging questions about its donors for months. Over the past year, Accountable Tech and other groups bankrolled by Omidyar organized campaigns to pressure corporations to boycott Twitter and issued statements and op-eds denouncing Musk and calling for government investigations into the billionaire. "I wonder who funds them," wrote Musk in May, in response to a Washington Free Beacon report about the organization's secretiveness.
A spokeswoman for the Omidyar Network confirmed the funding but told the Free Beacon that the foundation didn't order the Twitter boycott campaign. "We routinely support organizations that share our vision for a responsible technology system, but do not direct their day-to-day activities," said spokeswoman Beth Kanter....
January 2017 "My next book won’t be the non-fiction Silicon Valley exposé we desperately need (but here’s what it will be)"
Similarly, when Mark Ames showed me a document proving that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar had funded opposition groups in Ukraine right before the Maidan revolution, I assumed Omidyar – the Pez dispenser guy! – must have been duped by his friends in the State Department. Tech founders simply didn’t go around instigating military coups.
Perhaps I saw the first glimmer of the real story when I dug out the White House visitor logs and saw how many times Omidyar’s name appeared, and who he met. Or when I noticed the growing line of tech billionaires leading to the Oval Office, the Kremlin and various Saudi royal palaces....
November 2014 At the Intersection of Money and Power: "Pierre Omidyar’s man in India is named to Modi’s cabinet" (EBAY; AMZN; WMT)
And a bunch of links regarding The Intercept
October 2013 Adventure Capital: Ebay Founder Omidyar And NSA Nightmare Glenn Greenwald Team Up in a $250 Million Journalism VentureAnd one more long strange trip:
October 2013 Columbia Journalism Review: The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture
August 2014 Possible Problems in the New New Journalism: "Growing pains at the Omidyar/Greenwald venture"
October 2014 "Matt Taibbi Disappears From Omidyar’s First Look Media"
"Billionaire Funding ‘Abolish the Police’ Activists Invests in Private Security Start-Up"
I didn't know of the writer so I went to the all-knowing one. From the author's Wikipedia entry:
Lee Hu Fang is an American journalist. He was previously an investigative reporter at The Intercept, a contributing writer at The Nation, and a writer at progressive outlet the Republic Report. He began his career as an investigative blogger for ThinkProgress...
From Lee Fang's Substack, May 25....
