Ben Collins | |
|---|---|
 Collins in 2022 | |
| Education | Emerson College (BS) |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Awards | Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism |
Ben Collins is an American businessman and journalist from Massachusetts. He was a former reporter for the news division of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and became the CEO of the media company Global Tetrahedron, which owns The Onion , in 2024. [1] [2]
Collins is from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. His mother is a librarian. [3] [4] He attended Emerson College between 2006 and 2010. [3] While enrolled at Emerson, he was a music columnist for The Berkeley Beacon , the college's student newspaper. [1] [3] During college, he was a roommate of Chris Hurst, with whom he co-hosted a radio show as an undergraduate. [1] [5]
Following his graduation from Emerson, Collins began his career at Slam before performing social media work for Hulu. [3] Following his time at Hulu, Collins became a news editor of Esquire in 2013, [3] [6] where he remained for a year until he was hired by The Daily Beast . [3]
Between 2014 and 2018, Collins worked in various roles for The Daily Beast as a senior news editor and technology reporter. [1] [4] While Collins was employed at The Daily Beast, Hurst's girlfriend Alison Parker was shot and killed on live television. [5] Though Collins had not met Parker, [5] the incident and its aftermath deeply affected him; he decided to pursue reporting about online conspiracy theories and the far right after that. [1] [3]
At The Daily Beast, Collins frequently reported alongside researcher Brandy Zadrozny, who had joined the publication in 2013. [4] When offered an opportunity to work at NBC News in March 2018, Collins accepted it on the condition that he would be allowed to bring Zadrozny along to join him. [1]
In 2018, Collins and Zadrozny departed The Daily Beast to join NBC News. [1] [4] Collins has received special recognition from the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. [7] [8]
In December 2022, following controversial comments Collins made on social media that NBC says ran afoul of its social media standards, NBC temporarily suspended Collins from covering Elon Musk and Twitter. [9] [10]
In April 2024, Collins was announced as the CEO of Global Tetrahedron, a company that has purchased the satirical website The Onion . Its name is a reference to a fictional company described in Onion publications. [2] The purchase originated from a post by Collins on Bluesky after news broke that then-owner G/O was looking to offload the magazine among other titles. [11] [12] On November 14, 2024, Collins won the assets of website InfoWars at auction with support of the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. [13] The federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of Jones, Christopher Lopez, ordered an evidentiary hearing regarding the auction, saying "I’m going to figure out exactly what happened" and that "no one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.” [14]
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