Welcome to the ongoing saga of “Billionaires Remake the News in Their Own Image,” the reality TV show we're all stuck inside until the uber-wealthy get bored and move on to the next shiny object.
In today’s episode, a pair of fresh-faced entrepreneurs partner up with a Silicon Valley billionaire who is revered as a visionary, but also struggles to answer the question, “Should the human race survive?”
Their goal is simple: Use the Arizona Capitol Times to build an AI-powered intelligence platform that helps business owners get ahead of new regulations and laws in all 50 states.
State Affairs’ website touts the newspapers it’s using for its AI-powered platform.
Our cast includes Evan Burns, the founder of a liquor company, and Jamie Seltzer, the founder of a venture capital firm “targeting 'category defining' early-stage sports, tech, media and telecom startups.”
They’re joined by Peter Thiel, the guy who bankrolled Blake Masters’ run for U.S. Senate in Arizona, as well as J.D. Vance’s campaign in Ohio. Before that, Thiel gave Donald Trump some much-needed validation from Silicon Valley when he endorsed Trump in 2016.
Thiel made his billions by co-founding PayPal and then becoming a major player in the surveillance state. His company, Palantir, helps government officials process all the data they gather on your life every day, as well as providing AI tools to the U.S. military and ICE.
Also starting this month, the Republic and the entire newspaper chain that owns it are teaming up with Thiel’s Palantir to mine their subscribers’ data.
Thiel is an interesting character to join the league of billionaires swallowing up our news organizations.
And his name certainly rings out in newsrooms — a decade ago, Thiel put the fear of God into every news outlet that covers wealthy people when he engineered a lawsuit that bankrupted the online tabloid Gawker, apparently as revenge for Gawker outing him as a gay man.
Today’s episode begins with Burns and Seltzer launching State Affairs, which they bill as “the AI platform for policy and regulatory intelligence.” Over the past four years, they bought newspapers that cover legislatures in 14 states, including the Capitol Times in 2024.
The inciting incident, so to speak, came last month when they announced that Thiel’s Founders Fund was at the top of the list of investors that pumped $70 million into their venture.
All of a sudden, a scrappy private-equity-backed startup is now part of a democracy-shaking struggle between billionaires who want to control journalism and a news industry led by people who seem determined to drive it into a ditch.
Previously on…
The stage for today’s drama was set bit by bit over the past few decades, as the family-owned model that dominated newspapers gave way to corporate chains.
Before too long, hedge fund vultures started circling the newspaper chains. Then billionaires, smelling blood in the water, started buying up newspapers and slapping “I ❤️ journalism” stickers on them.
In the case of the Capitol Times, the Creighton family ran the paper for decades and made it a must-read for political insiders, while also providing a professional-grade legislative analysis service behind a paywall.
But the Creighton family sold it about 20 years ago, setting off a flurry of buying and selling that has stopped, for the moment, on State Affairs and Thiel.
Thiel isn’t unique. These days, it seems like journalism is all the rage in the billionaire class. The highest-profile example of billionaires-turned-news moguls in Arizona is David Hoffmann.
He took control of Lee Enterprises, the parent company of Tucson’s daily paper, the Arizona Daily Star, and dozens of other newspapers across the country, after he and his investment partners pumped $50 million into Lee and he was named chairman of the board in February.
In a hilarious episode of “Billionaires Remake the News in Their Own Image” from earlier this summer, Hoffman forced the Star and other Lee papers to run a series of stories praising him as the savior of local news.
The front page of the July 5, 2026, edition of the Daily Star. There were lots more glowing profiles inside!
That’s weird and vain, but it comes off as downright folksy compared to tech-obsessed investors like Thiel. They’re throwing wads of cash at news startups that promise to give businesses a leg up. (Bonus points if they can put an “I ❤️ AI” sticker next to the “I ❤️ journalism” sticker.)
For example, around the time Burns and Seltzer were creating State Affairs, billionaire Marc Andreessen, an early investor in Facebook and a Silicon Valley legend, got fed up with the news media and launched Future (as in, “the future of media”).
It’s a great example of billionaires not understanding the purpose of journalism, or at least pretending they don’t.
An NPR reporter described Future as consisting “mostly of techno-optimistic articles written by people who have a financial stake in the ideas they are pitching, many from companies backed by” Andreessen’s hedge fund.
The most recent posts on the Future website are from 2022, so that didn’t work out too well.
But another hedge fund was undeterred and launched perhaps the most craven distortion of journalism we’ve ever seen.
Hunterbrook Capital pumped $100 million into Hunterbrook Media in 2023. The way their model works is their “newsroom” reports on a company while the hedge fund bets whether the news story will cause a company’s stock price to rise or fall.
After all, their thinking goes, why shouldn’t news outlets get to reap the financial windfall of all their hard work? (The answer is so obvious it’s almost painful to explain. How impartial would you be if huge amounts of cash were dangled in front of you?)
But Hunterbrook keeps their “I ❤️ journalism” sticker front and center.
“We believe that investigative journalism is not only indispensable to free society, but also creates enormous economic value traditionally captured by everyone except the outlets and people publishing it,” per Hunterbrook Media’s About Us page. “So we’ve created a unique new business model to remedy that imbalance. We believe that good reporting can be good business — when you monetize insights rather than eyeballs, and align profits with accuracy.”
Next time on…
We can commiserate with people who are disappointed with the news business.
Why do you think we launched the Arizona Agenda in the first place?
And the State Affairs team is chasing a goal that we share: Using tech to better gather information from state governments, like we do with our Skywolf legislative intelligence service.
But the billionaire class lost the plot.
Their target audience is multinational corporations like Walmart — who the founders of State Affairs refer to as “customers” — not the general public. Journalism that doesn’t act in the public interest isn’t journalism. It’s market research or public relations. Sooner or later, it grows stale and decays.
You can see the higher-ups at State Affairs trying to straddle the line between business and journalism.
One of the board members insisted to the Washington Post that State Affairs was a data and tech company, “not a journalism product,” while an editor called herself a “tape-recorder-in-your-face kinda old-school.”
Center left: State Affairs’ CEO Evan Burns, who sold his Finnish alcoholic beverage company for more than $300 million. Center right: State Affairs co-founder Jamie Seltzer, who made his millions in venture capital.
While we’re watching episodes of “Billionaires Remake the News in Their Own Image” in Arizona, we’re also keeping an eye on another weird journalism project Thiel is backing.
A decade after bankrupting Gawker, Thiel co-founded Objection.ai with a crypto investor to allow AI to judge news reporting, which in their eyes would finally level the playing field for wealthy people who feel they were treated unfairly by the news media.
You know the software is trustworthy because it was made by the guy who founded the Enhanced Games, where athletes can use as many steroids as they like.
But Objection didn’t pan out the way Thiel wanted. Now, it’s been rebranded as The Primary and it uses AI to rank news outlets and reporters.
The website has a ticker-tape scrolling across the top with journalists’ names and rankings. If you go to a journalist’s individual page, you can see all sorts of stats like “evidence quality” laid out as data points.
It all looks so analytical!
Here’s how it actually plays out.
Michael Sackler, an heir to the Purdue Pharma fortune that was generated by almost single-handedly creating the opioid crisis, got his feelings hurt by Gary Baum, a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter who critiqued Sackler’s attempt to remake his image as an ethical investor.
Sackler took his complaint to Objection and paid to open an “investigation.” Baum recognized the absurdity of it all and wrote a great piece about his time before the tribunal, along with an enlightening history of The Primary.
The Primary doesn’t have the authority to force reporters to pay any money if the AI tools rule against them. But money isn’t what wealthy clients are after anyway.
“What they want is a moral victory,” Objection Founder and CEO Aron D’Souza told Baum. “Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’“
If you want to see where the Capitol Times might be headed, take a minute to read Baum’s stories.
In the meantime, we’ll go back to asking you, dear reader, to help keep the Agenda afloat, and out of the hands of billionaires.
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s 2026 general election debates kick off tonight.
If you’re tracking 2026 races in Arizona (and you should be) the debates are your best source of information about the folks who want your votes.
This year, we’re not just covering the debates — the entire Agenda newsroom is moderating the legislative debates.
And we want you to have a role in this whole experience, too.
So please take a quick minute to jot down some questions for your future elected representatives. We’ll try to shake some answers out of these candidates for you.
Head to the Clean Elections website to bookmark the full schedule of debates.
We’ll be covering the highlights as they happen.
While we were relaxing beachside during our summer break, Republican attorney general candidate and state Senate President Warren Petersen was grinding at the gym.
A reader snapped these pics of Petersen on the treadmill WEARING DRESS SHOES, SLACKS AND A TUCKED-IN DRESS SHIRT.
Yes, it’s bonkers to hit the treadmill in dress attire.
On the other hand, we respect the hustle.
Plus, the man’s commitment to staying camera-ready at all times — even mid-cardio — is genuinely impressive.
