OR Axel Springerthe German publishing group to which they belong among others Politico, Business Insider and Bild, announced that she will present her award for the 2026 to Peter Tillone of them most powerful and controversial people of Silicon Valley. Its co-founder PayPal and her Palantirits first major foreign investor Facebook and its basic form technological capitalism of the last decades,…

[Cord] Jefferson and [Max] Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as [Emma] Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. 

Scraper was not a hagiography. Carmichael, who became Gawker’s managing editor in her early 20s, describes the show as “Industry meets Succession,” with characters based on the characters who worked there. “We were telling the story honestly,” says Jefferson. “It was a morally queasy place, and that makes for interesting television.” 

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

“Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.”

But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

In August, when Jefferson — who was nominated that July for the Emmy he won for his writing on the HBO miniseries Watchmen — informed the writers room of Scraper‘s fate, Carmichael says, “I wish I had a screenshot because the playwrights and Hollywood people were, jaws on the floor, gasping, ‘What?’ And all the Gawker people were like, ‘This happens all the time.’ “

Of course, Cook was not the first tech titan to exact revenge on Gawker....

By Hanson O'Haver | The Gawker Archives

Used to be you could tell what people were like by what they liked. Not anymore.

Normcore, and its cultural equivalent, poptimism, complicated matters. If everyone is wearing tennis shoes and parent jeans and listening to Beyonce, how do you know who’s cool? The cognoscenti have always had a soft spot for items just past gauche — look at the Seattle scene’s embrace of fuzz and wack slacks — but eventually the norm and pop almost comprised the bulk of the trendsetter’s consumption.

It wasn’t hard to imagine two people becoming friends, perhaps even falling in love, without realizing they were operating on completely different irony levels.