Jonah Peretti

Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in November 2006 and led the company for nearly two decades, transforming it from a viral-content experiment into a multiplatform digital media group. In May 2026, with Byron Allen's $120 million acquisition of a controlling stake, Peretti stepped down as CEO and took up a new role as President of BuzzFeed AI, retaining an operational seat while Allen assumed the executive chair.

Peretti built BuzzFeed by pioneering the listicle format and an early viral-distribution playbook, growing its audience from nothing to tens of millions of monthly readers. He co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005 before launching BuzzFeed, and his background at the MIT Media Lab shaped his data-driven approach to content virality. BuzzFeed's peak valuation was reportedly $1.7 billion in 2016, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NBCUniversal and others. The company went public via SPAC in 2021 but struggled to sustain ad revenues; Peretti shut down the BuzzFeed News division in April 2023 and laid off 15% of staff.

The AI presidency role is a significant downgrade in formal authority but keeps Peretti central to the strategy that Allen is betting on: repositioning BuzzFeed as an AI-native publishing platform. Whether Peretti's decade of audience and editorial insight outweighs the cultural tension of serving under a broadcasting incumbent remains the central question of his third act.