• BuzzFeed used to be a high-flying digital publisher. Now it has shrunk considerably.
• BuzzFeed needed to find a way to pay off a big debt obligation due this month.
• It solved that problem by selling the company behind "Hot Ones" for $83 million to a fund controlled by investor George Soros.

Good news for BuzzFeed: It no longer has a huge debt problem looming over its head.

Slightly less good news for BuzzFeed: Solving the debt problem means the company needed to sell one of its buzziest assets — First We Feast, the production company that owns the "Hot Ones" interview show.

And now Hot Ones — the show where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings — is going to be owned by … investor George Soros and his family.

There's a bit going on here. We can break it down in a minute. But the big picture is that BuzzFeed, once considered a world-beating digital publisher, has staved off a potential extinction event (and, for what it's worth, has likely extinguished a threat posed by investor and political player Vivek Ramaswamy). And in addition, George Soros has added another asset to an interesting collection of media investments he has assembled in the past few years.

OK. Here are the details: As I've noted before, BuzzFeed was on the hook for $124 million in debt and interest payments and was facing the prospect of having to pay it back this month.

But now BuzzFeed has sold First We Feast/Hot Ones to what it's calling a consortium "led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management LLC" for $82.5 million in cash. Then it took the proceeds from that sale, threw in some cash it already had on hand, and paid back some $90 million of its debt obligations. BuzzFeed says it has $30 million in debt remaining, and that money is due in a year.

"BuzzFeed says its remaining businesses — BuzzFeed, the pop culture site best known for listicles, quizzes, and celebrity news; Huffington Post, the left-leaning news site; and Tasty, its food vertical — will power the company in the future, along with what CEO Jonah Peretti calls "new AI-powered interactive experiences."

First We Feast, meanwhile, says it will now operate as a standalone company. It says the deal and its new ownership structure will let it "fuel existing and new content franchises" and fund "future partnerships and acquisitions with other creators." A press release from the company says "Hot Ones" host Sean Evans is one of the investors in the new company, which suggests he's going to be sticking around for a while.

And while it might seem weird for Soros, who is worth a reported $7.2 billion and whose funding of liberal causes has made him a bogeyman for some US conservatives, to own a celebrity interview show, it's not a total shocker, for a couple of reasons.

For starters, Soros' empire — now run by his son Alex — has been making movies into media over the last few years. In 2022, it acquired a minority stake in Crooked Media, the podcast company best known for its "Pod Save America" show. And earlier this year, Soros acquired a controlling stake in Audacy, a bankrupt radio company with more than 200 stations in the US — a deal that incensed some Republicans.

There's also some connective tissue between Soros and BuzzFeed at play here via media executive Michael Del Nin. Back in 2021, Del Nin put together the deal that allowed BuzzFeed to go public, and he was set to become one of BuzzFeed's top executives in 2022. Instead, Del Nin went to Soros, where he leads the investment company's media unit.

The deal also means that BuzzFeed has reduced its risk that Ramaswamy, an investor and soon-to-be DOGE cochair advising the next Trump administration, will have meaningful influence in its future.

Earlier this year, Ramaswamy bought up a 9% stake in BuzzFeed and told Peretti he should bring a group of conservative media types onto BuzzFeed's board and turn BuzzFeed into a Twitter-style platform. Then he suggested that when BuzzFeed's debt came due this month, the company would be unable to pay it back and that somehow Ramaswamy would end up controlling the company. That doesn't seem like an option anymore.

• A few years ago BuzzFeed was supposedly worth close to $2 billion.
• Now it's worth much less, and it has been scrambling to solve a looming $124 million debt problem.
• That seems likely to come to a head this week, and may require the company to sell assets like "Hot Ones," its interview show.

What's going on with BuzzFeed, the formerly high-flying digital publisher?

This is a good day to ask. That's because today is the day that BuzzFeed could be on the hook for $123.5 million in debt and interest payments — money that it doesn't appear to have.

It is possible that BuzzFeed has a plan to deal with the debt — by selling off assets, or renegotiating a deal with its creditors, or both. And over the past month, public investors have seemed to think there's some kind of good news coming: They have pushed up BuzzFeed shares more than 72% in that time (though shares have dropped by as much as 5% today).

Last month, when BuzzFeed announced its quarterly earnings, it promised investors that "in the coming weeks, we look forward to sharing an update on our debt, balance sheet, Q4 financial outlook, and the results of the strategic review process we initiated last year with our financial advisors."

My educated hunch is that the update-to-be will happen later this week. But right now, BuzzFeed PR isn't commenting. I've also asked Vivek Ramaswamy, an investor and soon-to-be DOGE cochair advising the next Trump administration, for comment. That's because earlier this year Ramaswamy amassed a 9% stake in BuzzFeed and issued a set of demands to CEO Jonah Peretti, which Peretti seems to have ignored. Ramaswamy has not responded to my request.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed was shopping First We Feast — its business that owns "Hot Ones," the viral hot-chicken-wing interview show (Yup! I just typed that!) — for a reported $70 million. In September, Bloomberg reported that BuzzFeed was in talks with Netflix about some kind of deal. I've asked Netflix for an update on those chats, which it has never publicly acknowledged.

But just selling First We Feast/"Hot Ones" wouldn't be enough to pay down BuzzFeed's debt, and there isn't a lot left for the company to sell. In 2023, the company shut down its money-losing BuzzFeed News operation. Its remaining assets are BuzzFeed, the publishing operation best known for pop-culture quizzes and listicles; HuffPost, a news site; and Tasty, which used to dominate internet food content in a pre-TikTok world but doesn't anymore.

It's also worth noting that BuzzFeed doesn't necessarily have to pony up all $124 million today. Today is just the first day that BuzzFeed's creditors can get that cash, if they want it.

So if BuzzFeed does have good news to share this week, it is likely that it sold one of its content businesses — or at least struck a licensing deal — used that money to pay down some of the debt, and renegotiated the terms of the remainder. I think we'll know soon, either way.