Since parting ways with Fox News, talk show host Tucker Carlson has been reportedly considering founding a new media rival to the cable news giant.
Now, Carlson and his associates have reportedly raised $15 million to start the competitor, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday — bad news for Fox News.
Carlson has teamed up with longtime associate Neil Patel, and they’ve been masterminding a company registered in Nevada as Last Country Inc., according to the Journal.
Big investor Omeed Malik emerged from the seed round as the most high-profile donor. Earlier this year, Malik started an investment firm called 1789 Capital, named for the year of the Bill of Rights. As an ex-Democrat, Malik is apparently seeing opportunities in places ignored by “woke” capital.
Malik wants to invest outside the “ESG cult” and inside the “parallel economy” for conservatives, he told the Journal.
Malik has reportedly invested in The Daily Caller, another venture by Carlson and Patel. 1789 Capital made its big investment Monday as part of the seed round for Carlson’s new start-up.
Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has been posting long-firm interviews to Twitter. During the GOP’s presidential debate in September, Carlson was streaming his interview with former President Donald Trump.
Now, Carlson wants to continue posting free interviews to Twitter while putting even longer interviews behind a paywall, insiders told the paper in July.
“The whole vision is to create the next media company that is purpose-built for the 2020s and 2030s, in a way that Fox and Rupert [Murdoch] and Roger [Ailes] built a cable news business that was really purpose-built for its time and place,” Chris Buskirk, a co-creator of 1789 Capital told the paper.
“What we are focused on is opportunities that we think have developed in the market because other forms of institutional capital have become politicized.”
However, Carlson may face some legal roadblocks.
In June, Fox News took issue with Carlson’s decision to post on Twitter, and the network accused Carlson of breaching contract, according to correspondence obtained by Axios.
Carlson’s lawyer told Axios that Carlson can invoke the First Amendment in order to tweet his interviews legally.
The Horn editorial team