Kellen Leeson

In the 2010s, VICE was peak hipster American culture. The brand was known for loudly breaking taboos. Its cofounder, Gavin McInnes, would go on to found the Proud Boys and get banned from basically every social media platform for “hate speech.” By the mid-2010s, what began as an alt magazine in Montreal had landed an HBO show and convinced Rupert Murdoch and Disney to invest. It was, at one point, worth almost $6 billion. A decade later, it was bankrupt. @BCC_Mitchell, the youngest employee at Vice in 2012, takes us inside their rise and fall — from drug-fueled editorial meetings, to the CEO throwing $1m in cash at staff during a holiday party, to the team starting to chase ‘woke’ for clicks… …to, eventually, the CEO himself abandoning what made the company famous in the first place. “Vice was a cult,” Mitchell writes. “It was also the best business school on Earth.” Below, the deepest insider profile yet of a 2010s media giant 👇