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Give This Rich Dude $1 or The Onion Disappears Forever


Jeff Lawson’s plan to revive venerable satirical outlet The Onion involves borrowing from the playbook of the founders of WhatsApp.

There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he cofounded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company enabling businesses to communicate with customers via text messages and phone calls. As Lawson wrote in a tweet, under the traffic-obsessed regime of its owner G/O enterprises “The Onion has been stifled, along with most of the internet, by byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, bizarro belly fat ads, and clickbait content.” In 2011, Acton tweeted [a quote from the Fight Club movie]: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” In June 2012, they published a blog item laying out this philosophy.

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