Tucker Carlson on Twitter Could Work Awfully Well

Tucker Carlson is to Elon Musk’s Twitter. We should have seen it coming. The pairing, the of right-wing, edgelord provocation, makes perfect sense: Two great trolls that could troll great together, heaven help us.

Sure, what Carlson’s Twitter “show” will look like — and whether it’ll be anywhere close to as influential or remunerative as the Fox News gig from which — is an open question. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. With his , including promoting hateful conspiracy theories like the , Carlson is a singularly malign media personality.

, I’ve had a recurring nightmare that he might escape the echo chamber of Fox and become a much larger cultural and political force; Carlson is among the few people I can think of who’d be a more dangerous president than Donald Trump. Had he joined Newsmax, The Daily Wire, Rumble, One America News Network or another murkier corner of the right-wing mediasphere, I’d have breathed a small sigh of relief at the almost-certain diminishment of his mainstream influence. But the bird app still affords Carlson a pretty lofty perch from which to spew his particular brand of hate.

A sort of D. I. Y.

internet show also gives him more creative freedom than he had at Fox; freed from network suits and possibly more insulated from advertiser boycotts, Carlson on Twitter could get away with saying things that would make the Fox News Carlson blush or at least make that face that is his trademark. What I’m saying is: It’s not unreasonable to think Carlson’s Twitter move could work awfully well. It could also further tweak the meaning of “show.

” That word once described the thing you saw on TV as you sat on your sofa. Now it means podcasts and YouTube series and Twitch livestreams. But what is a show by cable’s formerly biggest star on a site that was once known strictly as a place for microblogging? It could be a long video posted every day; it could be short clips posted all the time; it could be something like a Twitter Space, an interactive conversation with fans; it could be some new format entirely.

I don’t know what Carlson will do, but in spirit, it doesn’t need to be very different from what he’s already done. He’s long been the YouTubiest man on TV; his genius, if you want to call it that, was in bringing the sneering sensibility and extreme views of right-wing internet pundits like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder to the Fox News audience. Production-wise, his show should be an easy lift.

The wood-paneled studio from which he broadcast his latest missive looks good enough for the internet and comports with his red state prepster vibe. At launch, he could simply do his monologues from there and post the clips to Twitter. After a while, he could start making more bespoke fare and charging a fee under Twitter’s , which allows creators to cultivate an audience that pays for exclusive content.

Last July, in its final earnings report as a public company, that about 238 million people used the service every day, close to 42 million of them in the United States. Even if the site under Musk has , it’s still used by millions, including legions of politicians and journalists who check it daily. Carlson’s Fox News show attracted an audience of about , according to Nielsen.

As I write, his Twitter sent out this week to announce the new show (captioned “We’re back”) has been viewed more than 25 million times. TV ratings aren’t perfectly comparable with internet metrics, but Carlson won’t be going to some cultural Elba. If his Twitter show achieves any traction — and if it’s, you know, not unwatchable — he could remain a driving force on the political right and in the broader conversation.

He could make a lot of money doing it, too. Maybe not the $20 million a year Fox paid him. But let’s say Carlson charges his fans $5 a month; he’d need only about 330,000 subscribers — about a tenth of his average nightly TV viewership — to match his earnings at Fox.

(Not accounting for Musk’s take. ) That’s a lot, but it’s not out of the question. A successful Carlson show could be a shot of adrenaline for Musk’s flailing purchase (and for the NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino, who’s in talks to become ).

The mercurial billionaire says Carlson isn’t getting any special treatment — “we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever,” after Carlson’s announcement — but landing him is an undeniable win. Twitter’s primary revenue stream, advertising, since Musk’s purchase of the service, and he’s been casting around for other ways to make money. Tapping into the creator economy that powers YouTube and TikTok is a .

Musk wants to cultivate Twitter stars who attract their own advertisers and paid subscribers, from whom he’ll presumably get a cut. Carlson could very well become Twitter’s first such superstar. His show wasn’t just a big hit on TV; it also attracted an online.

by the lefty media watchdog group Media Matters for America found that in March 2022, his clips were viewed 57 million times on YouTube — by far, more than any other Fox News host. (Sean Hannity, in the same period: about 5. 6 million views.

) And Carlson’s show was a moneymaker. Even though quite a few major advertisers shunned his race-baiting toxicity, his huge audience drew in enough low-end to make it one of the most lucrative shows on cable news. Would Mike Lindell, the conspiracy-theory-spewing MyPillow guy, continue to advertise with Carlson on Twitter? If Carlson maintains a big audience, why not? None of this is a foregone conclusion.

Online media is a tricky business, Musk is a capricious owner, and Carlson has either exited or been shown the door at all three major cable news networks. In other words, there are lots of ways the venture could fail. But I wasn’t laughing at Carlson’s announcement.

I was alarmed. Carlson on Twitter could be more popular, more pernicious and more powerful than ever before. Yikes.

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