It’s a familiar tale. A deep-pocketed new investor comes into a digital-media company with a transformative vision — and, inevitably, staffing cuts — to bring a fallen brand back to its former glory. This time around, the company is BuzzFeed and the investor is Vivek Ramaswamy, who revealed last week that he now owns a little over 8 percent of the former clickbait monolith that fell on hard times after going public almost three years ago.
But Ramaswamy’s hard-right politics — on display during his failed 2024 Republican primary challenger — bring a twist to the formula. In a letter to CEO Jonah Peretti on Monday, Ramaswamy suggested that the company hire conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for “creator-led” content, citing the hit show Hot Ones as a model for success. “Be bold,” he wrote. “Don’t be afraid to challenge your audiences.”
Bold, yes, but a tough sell for employees, as well as the human-resources and legal departments. Owens left her former employer, the Daily Wire, in the midst of a feud with its founder, Ben Shapiro, and a campaign to prove that the French president’s wife is actually transgender. Carlson, meanwhile, was ousted from Fox News last year after allegedly running a toxic and misogynistic workplace for years. Then there’s the money problem. To afford such expensive hires, Ramaswamy suggested getting back to “startup size,” which would “almost certainly require large-scale headcount reduction” in the next two to three months.
In the letter, Ramaswamy also took the opportunity to trash BuzzFeed News, which does not exist anymore, for its coverage — including publishing the Steele dossier, skeptical assessments of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and a takedown of Kevin Spacey. He suggested that the site issue an apology for failing “in our obligation to tell you the truth.” To ensure this doesn’t happen again at the vertical that no longer exists, he also called for three board seats to express a “diversity of viewpoints in your ranks.”
CEO Jonah Peretti, who owns 64 percent of the voting shares in the company he founded, does not agree with Ramaswamy’s vision. “Based on your letter, you have some fundamental misunderstandings about the drivers of our business, the values of our audience and the mission of the company,” Peretti wrote, quite politely. “I’m very skeptical it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits. And we’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.” For now, 64 percent trumps 8 percent. But Ramaswamy has at least bought the privilege of the CEO having to respond to his Roman Roy–esque ideas.
