DraftKings CEO Jason Robins slammed the New York Times for writing “slanderous” stories about the sports and entertainment gaming company “for a decade” on Wednesday at TheWrap’s Grill business conference.
“It’s disappointing that a publication that I, at least growing up, viewed as reputable just prints complete, factually incorrect information and misleading things,” Robins told The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman during a panel at TheGrill 2026 alongside Eagle Equity Partners LLC CEO Harry Sloan.
Robins continued: “The Times has been writing slanderous articles about us for over a decade. They usually try to release them right around the start of NFL season, and sometimes during the Super Bowl.”
Robins is specifically referring to this month’s story, “How DraftKings Uses A.I. to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose,” in which the Times reporters obtained internal documents and interviewed dozens of former DraftKings staffers, many of whom are concerned that the company’s efforts were exploiting problematic gamblers.
A spokesperson for the New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Robins continued: “They’re saying that we’re targeting people that are losing gamblers and have gaming issues, which is just completely false. Not true at all. In fact, we have sent them almost 20 pages of documents showing them what we’re doing, giving them the facts, and they refuse to print any of it. So what can I do in that case? But they’ve been doing this for years.”
Waxman asked Robins to point out something in the Times article which isn’t true.
“They said that we are writing models to target people that have problem gaming issues, which is not true,” Robins said. “In fact, we tell people to do the opposite, to try to figure out if people have problem gaming issues and give them warnings and eventually shut down their accounts if we need to. We don’t try to target them and give them more promotions to spend more. It’s crazy.”
Robins said the Times report incorrectly presented why the company moved away from a previous model.
“We got rid of a model that wasn’t working and put a better system in place,” Robins added. “That’s what companies do all the time. We’re not ignoring it. We have a Chief Responsible Gaming Officer who reports it to me. We have a team of 50 to 60 people that work on this stuff. Its entire job is dedicated to this. I can’t think of an industry or, in our case, a company that does more to try to combat this type of issue. And there are plenty of businesses where people spend too much money, probably, and you have to figure out the best way to serve the customer and not disrupt people who are actually trying to have a reasonable experience, because it’s hard.”
Robins closed the panel by making assurances that there are guardrails in place.
“It’s not like we can get into somebody’s head and know exactly who is and isn’t in a particular category,” Robins said. “So what we’ve chosen to do is we have things that we look at, and it triggers messages to customers. At some point it asks them, and sometimes actually compels them to set limits, or even in some cases we block accounts. We do all of these things.”
Elsewhere during the panel, the conversation pivoted to SPACS. A SPAC is a “special purpose acquisition company,” which is essentially a public vehicle that goes out and buys a private company, or multiple in this case, and takes them public.
Waxman asked Sloan, who is considered the father of the SPAC, on whether SPACS are useful.
“What’s happened now is SPACs have come back into vogue because SPACs are a good vehicle for these tech companies that are based on dreams” Sloan said. “So right now the hot stocks, if you’re taking anything public, the stocks that are working are robotics, quantum computing, AI chip makers, basically pre-revenue companies, nuclear power, and they’re all going public with SPACs. So SPACs are having a bit of a resurgence.”
Sloan gave the example on how a SPAC was used to separate Lionsgate from Starz.
“We used the SPAC last year to separate Lionsgate from two companies because the channel was out of favor, so they wanted to separate themselves from Starz,” Sloan added. “So we, the SPAC, bought everything else. We paid $4.6 billion to buy Lionsgate Studio, movies, television and library.”
