Nick Denton Biography
Nick Denton is a journalist, blogger, and Internet entrepreneur from the United Kingdom. He is the creator and former owner of the blog collective Gawker Media, and was the managing editor of the New York City-based Gawker until it went bankrupt due to a lawsuit filed by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan).
How old is Nick Denton? – Age
He is 56 years old as of 24 August 2022. He was born in 1966 in Hampstead, London, United Kingdom. His real name is Nicholas Guido Anthony Denton.
Nick Denton Family – Education
Denton was raised in Hampstead, London, as the son of British economist Geoffrey Denton and his wife, Marika (née Marton), a Hungarian Jew who survived the Nazis during the Holocaust in Hungary and escaped the Soviet 1956 invasion of Hungary at the age of 18. Rebecca is Denton’s younger sister. Denton received his education at University College School (UCS) and University College, Oxford, where he majored in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He also became the editor of The Isis Magazine, the university’s journal.
Nick Denton Partner
He is openly gay. Denton married actor Derrence Washington on May 31, 2014. He currently resides in New York City.
Nick Denton Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $50 million
Nick Denton Bankrupt
On August 1, 2016, Denton filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Hogan and Denton struck an agreement on March 22, 2017, allowing Denton to emerge from personal bankruptcy.
Nick Denton Gawker
Denton established Gawker Media in 2002, originally operating from his SoHo apartment in New York City. Gawker Media began with only two websites: Gawker (a news and gossip site) and Gizmodo (a gadgets and technology blog). Gawker Media blogs extended to include Jezebel (a women’s site) and Deadspin (a sports site), as well as Lifehacker (lifehacking), Jalopnik (automotive culture), io9 (science, futurism, and science fiction), and Kotaku (video games) (video games and culture).
Gawker sold music site Idolator to Buzz Media in 2008, Gridskipper to Curbed, and Consumerist to Consumers Union. Gawker Media had 17.5 million US visits per month in 2010. Denton was given a salary of $60,000 per year until 2012. In 2015, Gawker made $48.7 million in income. Following the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit defeat and subsequent 2016 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the majority of its assets were sold to Univision for $135 million.
Nick Denton Career
Denton began his career as a writer with the Financial Times, a daily business newspaper in the United Kingdom. All That Glitters is a book he co-wrote on the fall of Barings Bank, London’s oldest commercial bank in 1996.
He was a co-founder of the social networking site First Tuesday in 1998. The next year, Denton co-founded Furthermore Technologies with UCS classmates David Galbraith and Angus Bankes. Soon after, he relocated to San Francisco, California, and then to New York City in the summer of 2002.
Nick Denton and Peter Thiel
In an article headlined “Peter Thiel is absolutely homosexual, guys,” Denton’s Valleywag editor Owen Thomas outed Silicon Valley billionaire businessman Peter Thiel as gay in 2007. Denton pondered in the comments section of Thomas’ story about why Thiel kept “his personal life a secret from journalists… for so long.” As a supposed boyfriend, he mentioned “a man named Matt.” Thiel responded by dubbing Valleywag the “Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda.” Thiel claimed the sites were “scar[ing] everybody” and suffocating the Silicon Valley ethos, which is “supposed to be about individuals who are ready to think out loud and be different.”
Thiel then admitted in 2016 that he had spent $10 million in legal fees to fund multiple lawsuits filed by others against Denton and Gawker Media, including one filed by Hulk Hogan. Denton publicly accused Thiel on many occasions for plotting to take down Gawker.com.