Page Six Hollywood reports:

Like [Bari] Weiss, it is hard to pin down exactly where [Nick] Bilton falls on the political spectrum. The central tension is that Bilton, who regularly criticized Donald Trump during his first term in the pages of Vanity Fair, now finds himself inside a company that many see as friendly, if not subservient to the Trump Administration.

Interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest any political shift within Bilton has been subtle. Sources paint a picture of an extremely savvy operator who was deeply impacted by the October 7 attacks Hamas carried out against Israel, and who has a chip on his shoulder about some of the seismic cultural and political events that shaped the last decade.

One thing is certain: Despite coming up as a beat reporter grinding out stories first as a tech writer at the Times and then as a correspondent at Vanity Fair, Bilton was always comfortable walking the corridors of power and would soon find himself sitting at the table with some of the most powerful figures in the world. Like Weiss, he knows how to impress the wealthy and powerful. Also like Weiss, he arrives with a certain amount of personal baggage.

While the recent fury surrounding Bilton has mostly focused on his first few days on the job, one can look at his past work for a more rounded picture of the journalist. He wrote a piece in 2013 for Vanity Fair titled “My Dinner With Peter Thiel.” It’s hard to make sense of the piece. He acknowledges that the three-hour confab with Silicon Valley’s elite was not off the record. But he doesn’t recount a single thing discussed, “because I was so hungry that my brain could hardly retain the information.” There was no insight into the rise of Thiel at a moment when he was backing both candidate Trump and a lawsuit against Gawker that would send the news site into bankruptcy. Instead, Bilton mused about the culinary offerings and lamented the “sushi that looked like it had been picked up from a local Stop & Shop.”

A criticism of Bilton that emerges is that at a certain point in his career, he seems to have abandoned his mission as a journalist in an effort to join the elite crowd that he was supposed to be covering.

Back in 2013, before he was even a Times columnist, he was cc’d on an email from his literary agent, John Brockman, alongside a staggering list of the world’s richest and most powerful people including Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein. (Brockman was dubbed Epstein’s “intellectual enabler” by the New Republic.) The email is part of the Department of Justice’s Epstein Files. (A source close to Bilton pushes back on the idea that he ever went easy on the tech titans that he covered. “That’s bulls–t. Nick firebombed Silicon Valley with his coverage. He went after everyone to the point that he was no longer welcome in the place,” said the source.)

As of 2018, Bilton was still in the Brockman fold. [Continue reading…]