Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson is reportedly interested in either joining a competitor network or launching his own media empire, according to sources who spoke to Axios on Sunday.
“The idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous,” Bryan Freedman, Carlson’s attorney, told Axios about the current ongoing contract dispute with the network.
Since being fired from the network on April 21, Tucker Carlson’s departure has resulted in plummeting ratings for Fox News among key demographic segments, along with continued anger from its viewers, The Blaze noted.
Axios reports that Carlson is planning to establish his own media empire, but his efforts may be hindered because his contract with Fox is not set to expire until January 2025.
Axios also reported that there have been conversations between Carlson and Elon Musk about potentially working together. Additionally, sources have indicated that Carlson is considering a direct-to-consumer model for delivering his content to viewers.
Carlson posted a roughly two-minute video on Twitter addressing viewers directly after Fox News announced they were benching him. The post, which was uploaded on April 26 at 8:01 ET, his former time slot, has since been viewed nearly 81 million times, with the video itself garnering more than 24 million views.
Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023
“One of the first things you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how many genuinely nice people there are in this country, kind and decent people, people who really care about what’s true and a bunch of hilarious people — also, a lot of those,” Carlson said in the video.
“The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are, they’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them, trust me as someone who’s participated,” he added.
“And yet at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources,” he noted further.
The accompanying text simply read “good evening,” which is the same phrase Carlson used to open his eponymously-named show on weeknights.
“[Carlson’s] team is preparing for war. He wants freedom,” a friend of Carlson reportedly told Axios.
“Now, we’re going from peacetime to Defcon1,” the friend also said, adding that Carlson at first wanted to get the job done “quiet and clean.”
