What BuzzFeed CEO’s Mea Culpa Means

Those CEO apologies we’ve become used to seeing whenever a company announces layoffs are getting even more elaborate. BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, for instance, had quite a doozy of a mea culpa today as he announced the shuttering of BuzzFeed News and another round of layoffs at the digital media firm. After counting off all the challenges the company has faced—a pandemic, a tough economy and so on—he acknowledged having made a few management mistakes. These included overinvesting in BuzzFeed News and too slowly accepting that social media networks were not going to support it. Oh, yeah—he also confessed that he screwed up by not holding the company “to higher standards for profitability.” (For more on today’s news, see our report here).

Despite all that, Peretti is still in his job, something you can bet some shareholders (and laid-off employees) at BuzzFeed are wondering about right about now. BuzzFeed has been a disaster for investors both public and private. Its $200 million enterprise value compares with its peak private valuation of $1.7 billion from 2016. Its closing stock price Thursday of 75 cents compares poorly to the $8.56 price close on the day it went public in December 2021. Like other digital media firms of its generation (Vox Media, Vice Media and a few others too small to name), BuzzFeed is now synonymous with value destruction. And yet, protected by supervoting shares that give him ironclad control, Peretti is free to run BuzzFeed however he wants. And, like many other CEOs in this position (Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel), he can’t be fired.