Right Wing Biz Watch

Will Tucker Carlson Turn Omeed Malik Into the Right’s Next Media Mogul?

By David Lieberman, November 2, 2023

Rupert Murdoch washed his hands of Tucker Carlson in April when he kicked Fox News’ incendiary prime time star off the air. But the ultra-nationalist talk show host has found another money man to fuel his media aspirations – possibly in a big way.

Meet Omeed Malik, the founder of 1789 Capital and a former Democrat, who says he’s now on a mission to “finance the companies of tomorrow with institutional capital that is against what we call woke capital.”

Over the last few weeks he has emerged as Carlson’s most important benefactor in his effort to launch his own media company: Last Country Inc.

That relationship could become much more serious. An initiative Malik introduced with little fanfare in October provides a tantalizing clue about how he could provide Carlson with about $130 million to make Last Country a meaningful player in right wing media.

Carlson has started small by posting videos on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) – which Fox News says is a breach of his contract.

Last Country also plans to post content on its own site. The enterprise will be “driven by subscriptions but also offer a stream of free online videos” featuring Carlson and others, The Wall Street Journal says.

Malik’s Money Where Carlson’s Mouth Is

Malik just helped that effort by leading a $15 million funding round for Last Country. Malik and Carlson have been orbiting each other at least since 2020 when Malik became a minority investor and contributor to The Daily Caller, which Carlson and his one-time college roommate, Neil Patel, founded in 2010.

Malik made his investment shortly after Carlson sold his stake in the Caller to Patel who now is also CEO of Last Country.

The companies didn’t break out how much each funder contributed to Carlson’s latest media venture, but CNBC reported in July that Malik’s 1789 planned to make an “eight-figure investment.”

It’s set up as a relatively new kind of arrangement that gives Carlson a quick infusion of cash before he must prove Last Country’s viability and value. Instead of buying shares at a set price, Malik agreed to a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), the Journal says. In these deals, the investor accepts contractually agreed rights to the company’s equity when it’s offered.

The banker separately did his part to help Carlson’s business become viable.

Last week, Malik’s listing service for right wing e-retailers, PublicSq, announced that it signed a one-year deal to become Last Country’s first major advertiser. Axios said in July that the deal would likely be worth “more than $1 million.”

“There is a wave of disruption coming to the media and economic establishment, and our companies will help accelerate this overdue shift,” Patel said in a release.

Malik joined PublicSq’s board in July after he merged his publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Colombier Acquisition Corp, with the startup. A company filing in October said he controls nearly 5 percent of the combined company’s voting shares.

“Influential Figures with Large Followings”

These deals are noteworthy for the aid they give to the divisive former Fox News star. But Malik’s contributions are miniscule in the world of media money.

That’s what makes a little-covered document that Malik filed at the Securities and Exchange on October 6 so intriguing.

He submitted a preliminary prospectus to sell $130 million worth of stock in a new Cayman Island-incorporated SPAC, Colombier Acquisition Corp. II. If it succeeds and merges with Last Country, then Carlson would have a stockpile of cash as well as shares trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Malik’s SPAC doesn’t explicitly say that’s its goal. But Colombier II’s prospectus describes what an attractive deal partner would look like – and it fits Carlson’s company to a tee.

It says that “members of our management team” have experience “partnering with influential figures with large followings… This includes collaborating with celebrities, influencers and internet personalities to leverage their platforms and distinguish brands in competitive markets.”

What’s more, the board controlling Colombier II seems to have a lot of Carlson fans.

In addition to Malik, it includes Joe Voboril (a Daily Caller contributor who calls himself an “orphaned Democrat”), Chris Buskirk (editor and publisher of online journal American Greatness), and PublicSq’s 28-year-old CEO Michael Seifert.

Investors in Colombier II would have to believe that a merger with Last Country would make money, not just a political statement.

Here’s where the $15 million from the Malik-led SAFE investment and the ads from PublicSq seem to come in. They could give Carlson opportunities to demonstrate he can attract a significant audience, and advertising revenue, without Fox News.

Accustomed to Controversy

Although Malik is not a media maven like Murdoch, he knows his way around finance. After he graduated Emory Law School he became a corporate lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges and a prominent figure in hedge funds.

He’s accustomed to controversy. He worked for Jon Corzine – the former New Jersey senator and governor, and former CEO of Goldman Sachs – at his investment bank MF Capital. It became one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history in 2011 amid charges that MF Capital took excessive risks that it didn’t monitor.

Then Bank of America fired Malik in 2018 after a female colleague charged him with sexual misconduct. He denied the charges, and later that year ended his defamation suit against the bank when it agreed to what Bloomberg called a “multimillion dollar sum” to settle the case.

Now at his own investment firms – including Farvahar Partners along with Colombier and 1789 (named for the year the Bill of Rights was signed) – he has become a major contributor to Republican campaigns and to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Moving to the Right

That reflects a change in his political views that began with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, he said in April on a podcast, The Julia La Roche Show.

Trump’s surprise victory “made me question: what happened here? How could we have missed this? And I wanted to learn more about a country (where) I had not spent as much time looking outside of the coasts.”

He added that he became concerned about “the overemphasis on globalization and the rise of China” as well as “two unnecessary wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that left veterans “without jobs, addicted to opioids, and you have a large swath of the population that feels hopeless.” His growing disdain for traditional Democrats and Republicans grew with COVID lock downs that he called “overly draconian, particularly in blue states.”

He fires his sharpest attacks at the trend in corporations and investment firms to support what are known as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals – not just profitability – and by tech firms to crack down on disinformation about COVID and the 2020 election.

People “who are in tune with this now feel that the largest corporations are completely co-opted,” he said. That led him to support SPACs that he said enable right wing investors to “support the movement that they feel with their own dollars because they could just go and buy the stock.”

Will they also make money investing in entities such as PublicSq – or, perhaps, Carlson’s Last Country?

Malik should be OK for now: PublicSq pays $80,000 a month to Farvahar for “strategic advice and assistance.”

The jury is still out for other investors based on PublicSq’s performance since it went public in July. It initially sold for $10 a share and quickly spiked to more than $35 – but closed Wednesday at $6.10, up from its low of $4.30 on Oct. 12.

Contributing: Gina Chuang

Right Wing Biz Watch is a ongoing series of articles examining the business and finances of right wing media. Its author, David Lieberman, covered the media business full time for 30 years at USA Today and other publications before joining The New School as an Associate Professor in its  graduate Media Management program.

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