Satire site The Onion has a new owner: a company called “Global Tetrahedron,” which apparently is a real thing.
G/O Media, a private-equity backed firm that has owned The Onion since 2019, sold the site to a new Chicago-based firm called Global Tetrahedron, which is “made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy-based content,” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said in a memo to staff Thursday.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. A G/O Media rep declined to identify the new owners of The Onion. The site, which first launched as a weekly newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wis., carries the tagline “America’s Finest News Source.”
The sale of The Onion comes amid “an extensive review of our portfolio with the intention of coring down to our leading sites in terms of audience and revenues,” Spanfeller said in the memo.
Last month, G/O Media sold The AV Club, a spinoff of The Onion that covers pop culture, to Atlanta-based Paste Magazine. Paste previously acquired Jezebel last fall after G/O Media had shut down the site and laid off its staff. In March, G/O laid off the staff of Deadspin and sold the sports news and commentary site to Lineup Publishing, based in Malta, in the island nation located in the Mediterranean Sea. And in March 2023, G/O Media sold how-to site Lifehacker to Ziff Davis.
The new owners of The Onion have agreed to keep the “entire staff intact and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal,” according to Spanfeller. “The Onion for over 35 years has been an indispensable part of our country’s cultural fabric with its unique brand of satire and comedy that continues to be just as important and relevant today than at any time during its storied history. I would like to personally thank The Onion team for their hard work and dedication during their time at G/O Media. They are a talented group of people, who I have no doubt will continue to flourish with their new owners.”
Global Tetrahedron is the name of a fictional company in The Onion’s 1999 book “Our Dumb Century.” The company first appears as a small business in the first decade of the 20th century and “gradually grows into a multinational behemoth,” per the book’s description.
Spanish-language media company Univision acquired a controlling stake in Onion Inc. in January 2016. In 2019, G/O Media bought Chicago-based Onion Inc. in a deal with Univision, along with sites formerly housed under the Gizmodo Media Group (which Univision had acquired those in a bankruptcy sale of Gawker Media’s assets).
G/O Media’s brands now comprise tech site Gizmodo; car culture site Jalopnik; gaming site Kotaku; African American news and culture The Root, business news site Quartz (acquired in 2022) and e-commerce site The Inventory.
From Variety US