Tucker Carlson Seeking to Raise ‘Hundreds of Millions’ to Fund New Media Company With ‘Twitter as Its Backbone’
Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson and longtime business associate and former Bush administration adviser Neil Patel are seeking to raise “hundreds of millions” for a new Twitter-based media venture, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Carlson has been running a Twitter-based show since his messy public break-up with Fox News, with designs on a new empire first hinted at by Dylan Byers at Puck last month now becoming a more clarified ambition.
Byers wrote that Carlson would “certainly benefit from an incongruous number of ultra wealthy conservative media investors and a scant (though growing) number of opportunities.”
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal’s Keach Hagey and Alexa Corse wrote that Carlson has teamed up with Patel, with whom he co-founded the Daily Caller, to “start a new media company that would potentially use Twitter as its backbone.”
The new company would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos that Carlson has been posting regularly on Twitter since shortly after his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions, some of the people said.
Carlson and Patel are looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the company, the people said.
Users of Twitter and other platforms would still be able to watch free, shorter versions of his show, interviews and documentaries, but would need to subscribe to watch them in their entirety, the people said. The company would eventually add shows from additional hosts, they said.
Carlson’s latest episode, a two-hour interview of accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, was not well-received.
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