More than 120 journalists at Business Insider and Politico are protesting parent company Axel Springer’s decision to honor billionaire Peter Thiel, arguing that celebrating the tech investor conflicts with the company’s stated commitment to press freedom.
The employees raised their objections in a letter to Axel Springer leadership ahead of Thursday’s ceremony in Berlin, where Thiel is set to receive the company’s annual Axel Springer Award, according to Status.
The protest comes two months after Axel Springer announced Thiel as this year’s recipient, praising the PayPal and Palantir co-founder as one of the digital era’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. CEO Mathias Döpfner said at the time that Thiel “reminds us that progress requires courage and nonconformism.”
Thiel’s history with the press has made the decision particularly sensitive inside a company that owns major U.S. news organizations. He secretly financed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker after the site published a 2007 article outing him as gay. Hogan won a $140 million judgment in 2016, helping drive Gawker into bankruptcy and fueling a broader debate over the ability of wealthy individuals to use litigation against news organizations.
The employee pushback also comes as one of Axel Springer’s U.S. newsrooms is fighting a separate battle over press access. Politico, CNN and MS NOW sued the Trump administration this week after President Donald Trump barred their journalists from the White House.
When announcing Thiel as the award’s recipient in July, Axel Springer said the honor recognizes figures who have made a lasting impact on business, society or technology and described it as an opportunity to engage with influential figures, “to challenge their ideas, and to bring their vision of the future into the public debate.”
Asked Wednesday about the employee objections, an Axel Springer spokesperson referred TheWrap back to that statement. The spokesperson also noted that Thursday’s ceremony will be livestreamed. The Insider Union did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The ceremony will feature a discussion between Thiel and Döpfner, along with a contribution from CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and a conversation with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.
Previous recipients of the Axel Springer Award include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
