Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and ex-White House adviser Neil Patel have teamed up to fund a new independent media company, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The duo is reportedly looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build the company, the report detailed, citing people familiar with the matter.
The new outlet would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos Carlson has shared regularly on Elon Musk’s Twitter since his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions, according to the report.
Carlson, who hosted the highly rated Tucker Carlson Tonight at Fox, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sought by Reuters.
A video posted by Tucker Carlson to his Twitter page beat his old Fox News Channel time slot within the first hour. https://t.co/qQbtAx6c3D
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 28, 2023
As Breitbart News reported, Carlson and Fox News parted ways in April after parent company Fox Corp settled for $787.5 million a lawsuit that claimed the news network defamed Dominion Voting Systems by airing false election-rigging claims.
The separation ended a long run of success for Carlson at the network.
In April 2020, the Tucker Carlson Tonight program surpassed Hannity as the highest-rated primetime cable show, averaging an audience of 4.56 million viewers.
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In the second quarter of 2020, the show saw an average audience of 4.33 million viewers. That was the largest number of viewers for any program in the history of cable news.
According to Mediaite in 2022, “Carlson [was] the number-one watched host among Democrats in the key 25-54 age demographic – across all networks” in the month of October.
Carlson will now be looking to replicate that support in his new venture.
In a video posted on Twitter in May, Carlson had said he would relaunch his show on the social media platform “soon.”
A cease-and-desist letter has reportedly been sent to Tucker Carlson from his previous employer Fox News over his new Twitter show that went public last week. https://t.co/9TjYYOpJBG
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 12, 2023
He released the first episode of his new show, “Tucker on Twitter”, in June.
Fox News retaliated by notifying his legal team, saying that the former prime-time host violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show, according to an Axios report in June.