(Reuters) – Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former White House adviser Neil Patel are looking to raise funds to start a new media company that could potentially be anchored on Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The duo is looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the company, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company would be anchored by longer versions of the free videos that Carlson has been posting regularly on Elon Musk’s Twitter since his departure from Fox News, but would ultimately be driven by subscriptions, according to the report.
Carlson did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for a comment, while Patel was not immediately reachable.
Carlson and Fox News agreed to part ways in April after its 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. Carlson had played a starring role in the lawsuit.
In a video posted on Twitter in May, Carlson had said he would relaunch his show on the social media platform “soon”. 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.
(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam and Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Varun H K)