Vice Media

Digital mediaUSA

New to Unitard

🤝 Acquired🔄 Reorganized

Peak $5.7 BillionToday

~-94%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2014
📈
Peak valuation
$5.7 Billion ’17
💔
Became a Unitard
May 2023
💸
Last valuation
~$342M

Capital raised

$1.3B

Total raised

$123K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 28.9 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: Adweek / NPR / Axios

Current status

Chapter 11 (May 2023); sold to a lender consortium in a deal valuing it ~$350M.

The rise & fall

8 moments · 1994–2024

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

1994

Founded as a punk magazine in Montreal

Three decades later it would be pitched as the future of media.

Wikipedia

2014

Joins the unicorn club

A&E and Technology Crossover Ventures money values the edgy empire in the billions.

Variety

Jun 2017

The peak: TPG invests at $5.7B$5.7B

Disney, A+E and TPG have all bought the story of TV for millennials.

Axios

2019–23

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2019–23

Glassdoor reviews read like a countdown — near-quarterly layoff rounds, unpaid vendors knocking office software offline, staff learning of cuts from press reports, and executive bonuses flowing while laid-off colleagues waited months for severance.

May 2023

Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

The digital-ad collapse finishes what the losses started.

NPR

Jul 2023

Sold out of bankruptcy for ~$350M

Lenders Fortress, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital take the keys.

Variety

Feb 2024

Stops publishing on vice.com

Hundreds more cut as the site goes quiet.

NYT

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Vice Media grew from a punk magazine into an edgy digital-media empire spanning Vice News, an HBO show and a sprawling video operation, peaking at a ~$5.7B valuation in 2017 on investment from Disney, A+E Networks and TPG.

Mounting losses and a collapsing digital-ad market gutted it; in May 2023 it filed for Chapter 11, and lenders Fortress, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital bought it out of bankruptcy at around $350M.

Source: NPR / Variety / Axios ($5.7B peak valuation 2017 on Disney/A+E/TPG money; Chapter 11 May 2023; ~$350M sale to Fortress, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, 2023)