Michael Arrington's Revenge

One day in January 2009, the technology blogger Michael Arrington was leaving a business conference in Munich when a stranger walked up and spat in his face. In a later blog post he professed shock and outrage, and described the spitter as “some unhappy European entrepreneur we didn’t write about,” but the incident couldn’t have been all that surprising to Arrington. It’s hard to think of anyone in the technology world who has been insulted more often in public settings.

The founder and most prominent voice on TechCrunch, a website chronicling Silicon Valley, Arrington created an affiliated, lucrative conference business before selling both to AOL in September 2010 for roughly $25 million. A year later he set off a firestorm over potential conflicts of interest when he announced that he was starting the CrunchFund, a $20 million-plus micro-venture capital fund specializing in seed and early-stage investments in Internet companies, with $8 million of AOL’s money. Even before the CrunchFund outcry, Arrington was a frequent target of abuse. On stage at a May 2010 conference, former Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz told him to “f— off.” Technology critic Leo Laporte once said to him, during a live webcast, “Screw you, Mike, you are such a troll.” Rival blogger Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD said that “being lectured on journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney Spears.”