The culture warrior head of CBS News has been caught in an embarrassing new leak, awkwardly fawning over yet another billionaire.
Bari Weiss, the newly installed CBS editor-in-chief credited with the network’s Trumpy turn, was caught on camera presenting the Axel Springer 2026 award to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel in Berlin on Thursday. The award honors an entrepreneur, investor, and thought leader who has significantly shaped digital transformation. Previous recipients include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The event is supposed to take place behind closed doors, but a broadcast was leaked almost immediately.
“I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit: heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent,” gushed Weiss, who was appointed to CBS last year by billionaire David Ellison, despite having no broadcasting experience.
The video, shared by Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr on X, shows Weiss rambling for eleven minutes about Thiel, a German-born U.S. citizen and fervent supporter of the Trump administration.
Among other compliments, the former anti-woke blogger fawned over Thiel’s prestigious fellowship, which he gives to teenagers in lieu of college, and his apparent inference that “much of American higher education had gone bust.”
She then quoted Ross Douthat, another conservative New York Times columnist she recently poached for 60 Minutes—which has subsequently plummeted in ratings—who referred to Thiel as “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the past 20 years.”
“I think that might be true, but what that label ‘right-wing’ or ‘conservative’ misses is how strange and wild, how untamed Peter’s worldview is,” Weiss said. “It’s why it’s so fun to sit across from him in a conversation or an interview, because you never know where he will go.”
She continued: “What those who love him and those who love him just a little bit less can’t dispute is this: he sees things before the rest of us do. He knows what’s coming and seems consistently to get there first, it’s an extraordinary quality and one that’s given him an astonishing track record,” Weiss said.
Another extraordinary quality Thiel possesses, one may say, is his penchant for litigation. Thiel secretly funded a $140 million lawsuit against the outlet Gawker, forcing it into bankruptcy—which led many Axel Springer employees to protest his being honored by a media company, to no avail. Mathias Döpfner’s company, Axel Springer, owns American outlets including POLITICO, Business Insider, and Morning Brew.
Weiss, for her part, acknowledged that she and Thiel had “disagreements,” citing her life’s work in media and Thiel’s public musings against freedom of the press.
“I see it as an instrument of liberty and as an engine of progress that deserves to be invested in and perfected, but to the extent Peter and I disagree on this, I’m going to consider it a victory for my side of the argument that he’s here tonight receiving an award from an institution that’s become synonymous with freedom of the press,” she said.
Weiss prefaced her comments with a cringeworthy quip that left the room nearly silent, apparently trying to preemptively get ahead of any potential leaks of her speech.
“I want to begin tonight by thanking you all for attending my lecture on the Antichrist,” the Free Press founder said. “For all the media journalists who are watching this or poring over this transcript, that was a joke. I only talk about the Antichrist at my secret weekly meeting supervised by the Mossad in Tel Aviv.”
