# Nick Bilton **Nick Bilton** (b. 1976, Darlington, England) is the British-American technology journalist whom [[CBS News]] editor-in-chief [[Bari Weiss]] named executive producer of [[60 Minutes]] on **May 28, 2026**, replacing Tanya Simon — a newsroom veteran who had run the broadcast since Bill Owens quit in April 2025 over [[Skydance-Paramount]] interference. Bilton had never produced television. Five days into the job he signed the June 2, 2026 letter firing [[Scott Pelley]], the program's most senior correspondent, after Pelley confronted him at his first all-staff meeting; the letter called Pelley's conduct a "performative display of hostility." See [[Scott Pelley Firing]]. ## Before CBS Thirteen years at the *New York Times* (2003–16) — design editor, then the technology columnist who wrote the *Bits* column and, in 2013, *Hatching Twitter*, the account of the company's founders' knife-fight; then a decade as a special correspondent for *Vanity Fair* (2016–26), where he wrote the long profiles of Silicon Valley's owners and *American Kingpin* (2017), on [[Ross Ulbricht]] and the market traced in the [[Silk Road Darknet Market Timeline]]. He directed *Fake Famous* (HBO, 2021), an experiment in manufacturing influencers. The résumé is that of a chronicler of the tech elite, which is the point: the new owners of CBS chose someone who knew their world, not the broadcast's. ## Why he matters here Bilton is the personnel form of [[Media Capture]]: a program that had been the most-watched news broadcast in America for fifty years, and the subject of Trump's $16 million settlement extraction in 2025, was handed to an outsider chosen by an owner-installed editor, and its senior correspondent was gone within a week. Whether that is modernization or subordination is the argument the [[Skydance-Paramount]] and [[CBS News]] pages track; Bilton's own stated plan — a digital-first *60 Minutes* — is the version the owners tell. ## See Also - [[Scott Pelley Firing]] · [[Scott Pelley]] · [[Bari Weiss]] · [[60 Minutes]] · [[CBS News]] - [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[Media Capture]]