Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room. Kudos to Maggie and Swan on the release of Regime Change, their instantly canonical Situation Room chronicle, which sold out on Amazon in under 24 hours. A.G. and Dolnick are throwing the pair a well-deserved party at the Times building on Eighth Avenue tonight, which I’m sad to miss. One hopes the star reporters will eventually get a salary bump, too! I mean, if Dianna Russini is worth $800K a year…

In tonight’s email, news and notes on Ben Shapiro’s attempt to raise another $100 million for The Daily Wire, and his alleged ambition to one day take his conservative media empire public. In truth, this seems like a desperate cash grab for a company beset by audience churn, revenue declines, and executive infighting. The Wire will almost certainly never I.P.O.; it’s not even clear how much potential remains for future growth. As always, my Wednesday send is available exclusively to Inner Circle members. Upgrade now for access to tonight’s email, the entire suite of Puck’s private newsletters, and our sister publication, Air Mail.

🎙️ Plus, on the most recent episode of The Grill Room, Silicon Valley comms guru Lulu Cheng Meservey joined me to explain her founder-centric P.R. strategy and make the case for why startups should ditch traditional media and dictate their own narrative. Lulu has a lot of fans in the Valley and, as I learned this week, some player haters in the P.R. world. Go figure! Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.

Also mentioned in this issue: Larry and David Ellison, Barbara Byrne, Steven Ginsberg, Jeremy Boreing, Joe Ravitch, Jason Illian, Rashida Jones, Megyn Kelly, Theo Kyriakou, Liz Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Piers Morgan, Candace Owens, David Perpich, David Hawkins, Caleb Robinson, Mike Richards, Nick Thompson, Bari Weiss, and many more.

$45 million: The sum Larry Ellison gave to a political nonprofit supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal’s new exclusive on the billionaire’s influence in the White House.

$49.5 million: The amount that Larry’s son, David, told Paramount board member Barbara Byrne it would take for the company to settle the president’s lawsuit against CBS News over 60 Minutes’s Kamala Harris interview. (Paramount ultimately settled for $16 million.)

And now, the main event…

On Tuesday, shortly after the news broke that conservative media star Ben Shapiro was eyeing an I.P.O. for The Daily Wire and seeking a new $100 million-plus investment, a well-placed source texted me to offer a clearer-eyed assessment. They are “wanting [and] needing to grab cash,” the source said. “I’ve never known what it feels like to be drowning, but I guess this is that.”

As you know, The Daily Wire has spent the past year mired in internal dysfunction as leadership clashed over conflicting strategies, audience erosion, mass layoffs, and Shapiro’s own slow-motion falling-out with the MAGA zeitgeist. Amid those rolling challenges, Ben severed ties with one co-founder, Jeremy Boreing, then pushed another, Caleb Robinson, to the margins. Meanwhile, he enlisted the help of a conservative-oriented SPAC to help explore new avenues for liquidity, all while maintaining that his business remained fundamentally strong.

The numbers do seem formidable, with a stated $200 million in revenue and $48 million in adjusted EBITDA last year. But the pitch to investors, which was obtained this week by Semafor’s Max Tani, also put hard numbers on the extent of Ben’s struggle. Paid subscriptions, which account for three-quarters of The Daily Wire’s revenue, declined by a third over the past year to around 850,000, and are on pace to decline to around 770,000 this year. Advertising revenue, which accounts for around 20 percent of revenue, has dropped every year for the past three years.

In light of those challenges, Max revealed that the Wire has been in talks with Highmount Capital to lead an investment round of more than $100 million at a $750 million valuation. Highmount, the investment vehicle of Koch alum Jason Illian and David Hawkins, recently invested more than $100 million in Dude Perfect, the creator-led sports media startup that got its start posting trick-shot videos on YouTube. Highmount seems to believe that the Wire can follow a New York Times–style playbook by diversifying into new verticals and expanding its infomercial-grade consumer products business, which already includes multivitamins, cigars, and razors.

I don’t know the provenance of the leak, of course, but this sure seems like the sort of thing that Ben and his partners would want floating around in the ether. About 18 months ago, Caleb convinced Ben to enlist a SPAC called SilverBox Capital to explore possible exits. (Caleb remains on the board after stepping down as co-C.E.O. last month.) As I’ve reported, SilverBox is best known in the SPAC world for merging with Black Rifle Coffee Company, the pro-military, pro-gun-rights coffee brand that now trades 90 percent below its $1.7 billion high. In any event, Highmount is fueling the perception that the Wire’s best days are still ahead of it, and that there’s a high ceiling. The investor pitch claims that the company has rejected buyout offers surpassing $1 billion, and that it could conceivably I.P.O. at $2 billion before the end of next year.

In truth, The Daily Wire will almost certainly never I.P.O. First, any business that’s losing subscribers and advertising—especially at this rate—lacks the growth profile that public investors demand. Moreover, despite all its aspirations for diversification, the company's fortunes have always been wedded to a key man, Ben, whose star sure seems to be fading. Finally, even at $48 million in adjusted EBITDA, a $2 billion public valuation would require investors to award the Wire with a software-style multiple that media companies almost never receive. In actuality, the I.P.O. talk is likely a ploy to raise private capital by selling investors on a dream-scenario hypothetical.

But the Wire also shouldn’t I.P.O.: Its only true value in the marketplace is as an independent, affinity-based media and lifestyle brand that can still deepen its relationship with existing subscribers and their wallets. (If Nick Thompson and Bari Weiss can sell subscribers on private dinners and cruises and international excursions, why not Ben?) Obviously, that works only if Ben can reverse these declines. The Wire may be selling its would-be investors on the idea that it’s still a growth company with multiple expansion vectors and untapped consumer product opportunities, but the numbers suggest it’s actually a mature company that’s lost its hold on the zeitgeist and is fighting to retain subscribers in an increasingly crowded market.

As I’ve reported before, Ben and his partners have blamed much of The Daily Wire’s woes on their former partner Jeremy’s costly investment in a fantasy series called The Pendragon Cycle. Highmount similarly argues that the $50 million allotted to that project “consumed the majority of the 2025 content budget, leaving fewer resources for new programming that could drive subscriber acquisition and marketing.” Inarguably, this was a distraction—and a humiliation for all involved. But it’s also a red herring.

Indeed, the Wire’s real challenge is that the conservative media ecosystem has become far more fragmented than it was when Ben and his partners built the site. A decade ago, he was one of a handful of insurgent personalities capitalizing on distrust of the mainstream press. Today, he’s competing not only with Fox News, but also with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and an endless parade of YouTube creators, as well as the algorithmic chaos of social media. Ostensibly, this is the point in The Daily Wire’s maturation process when it should drill down on its existing subscriber base and start giving them more opportunities to open their wallets. But it’s increasingly unclear that it still commands the affinity necessary to do so.

A professional-grade rundown on the business of sports from John Ourand, the industry’s preeminent journalist, covering the leagues, players, agencies, media deals, and the egos fueling it all. Plus, the latest intel from Eriq Gardner on the sports legal beat.

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

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