Bari Weiss and Billionaire Failson David Ellison Have No Clue What They’re Doing

By Jacob Weindling | November 11, 2025 | 5:39pm

Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press

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Bari Weiss and Billionaire Failson David Ellison Have No Clue What They’re Doing

We live in an age of collapse, where the stewards of the old world prove they have no idea how to build a new one while burdening us with their idiot spoiled children, and this is a generational opportunity for media moguls willing to invest in a new paradigm. While timid cost cutting is the trend of an industry filled with capitalists unable to envision tomorrow, Bari Weiss and her band of AI “virgin” slop enthusiasts and bad John Oliver lampooners at The Free Press are hailed as the future of media thanks to the amount of money that David Ellison paid for them. The old world exists at NBC, the new one at CBS and The Washington Post, so goes the story of the aggro gilded elite overtaking modern media. The right-wing podcast bros have arrived in the zeitgeist, and Bari will lead everyone to a new frontier where she…uh, invites authors of fiction on TV to analyze unrelated real-world events.

“At 9 a.m. editorial planning meetings that staffers say Weiss attends sporadically, some staffers have recoiled at her editorial suggestions,” reported The Washington Post. “One found her proposal to book Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown for an interview about the recent heist at the Louvre frivolous.” A report from The Independent today quoted Bari Weiss asking CBS “what’s the point of standards?” Which really is the chef’s kiss summary of how vapid right-wingers like her understand how journalism gets made. The report went on to detail how she will likely cut the department back, a really terrific idea for anyone who wants to invite lawsuits upon their billionaire backer. There is this belief on the right-wing that journalism just gets reported somehow and the layers of fact-checking and legal dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s can just be done by an AI or something, and CBS News seems like it will be a real live experiment in this form of anti-journalism taken as a form of gospel among those in Bill Ackman’s mentions.

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Weiss is also walking around CBS like she’s some sort of tribal warlord with a bunch of bodyguards at a time that the company is firing around 100 staffers–including the entire Race and Culture Unit, and former producer Trey Sherman said that “every producer…who was laid off is a person of color,” while his white colleagues were reassigned. CBS also fired eight anchors after Weiss took over, all of them women. Meanwhile, former network executives are telling The New York Post that “It’s highly unusual for a news executive to have six bodyguards.” Oh is it! Weiss is such a shambolic embarrassment, actually successful right-wing rags are calling their sources so they can point and laugh at her in public. It’s impossible to overstate how deeply embarrassing she is and how transparent this effort to create a Fox News competitor is.

There are summer interns at CBS who have done more reporting work in their lives than Bari Weiss has. She is a joke. As I wrote weeks ago when it became clear CBS was headed down this beclowning path, her lone skill is telling old rich out of touch people that their revanchist beliefs most people disagree with are actually brilliant, and she showed how the world actually works by using this skill to never work a day in her life. In a lot of ways, I’m jealous of her, she’s living the dream. Perhaps she is as cynical as she acts, which would make her a very savvy and a very cynical person. Maybe no one understands the braindead American elite better than she does, given that they have funded her whole career. We do know that David Ellison is a chump who spent hundreds of millions of his dad’s money on a grift that makes it likelier they will be sued; all in the hopes that Bari freaking Weiss can get young people to watch the third-rated mainstream news network with the oldest audience by inviting people who didn’t write about fictional heists on to analyze a real one. What geniuses our modern gilded elite are.

And yes, I was also told that people on the call then joked that Bari should instead get Pierce Brosnan instead of Dan Brown because there was no heist in The Da Vinci Code…

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 8:01 PM

Imagine me running CBS News. What a farce! Like Bari, I am just a humble blogger who has never worked a full-time reporting job, and no one in their right mind should give me that gig. But unlike Bari, I know to stay in my lane. I have edited reporting and have done fact-checking to make sure it is what we say it is and you know I can do that because I am still here and not sued out of the industry–but being a full-time reporter digging up new information is a whole different world from being some shmuck sitting behind a computer and vetting information other people bring to you. Bari Weiss has spent her opening weeks learning this fact on the job from people better suited for her job than she is, and we’ve been able to hear all about it as those people have flooded the media with leaks. Real tight ship she’s running over there.

It’s very telling that the capitalists of this era value comfortable lies over the bravery of charging into the unknown, and would prefer to invest in The Free Press than ProPublica. Perhaps it is because discovering hidden news in this age often produces unflattering results for a gilded elite desperate to assert that they’re more competent than their actions prove them to be.

David Ellison’s Math Doesn’t Add Up

You know that this is a braindead propaganda operation run by a billionaire failson both because of basic math I’ll get to later in this section, and because Weiss has a unique job you don’t find in media organizations. This may come as a shock to the Ellisons, but news organization heads sit atop the news organization chart, yet Weiss and her special arrangement with Paramount CEO David Ellison places her outside of the CBS News org chart and has her reporting directly to him. I wonder what they talk about!

This whole era of investing in markers of collapse like The Free Press cannot be understood first without the dual reckonings of Me Too and Black Lives Matter creating some measure of accountability for America’s elite for the first time in their lives. That their reaction to these movements for justice was to rabidly support a fascist project both in Israel and the United States the first chance they got says a lot about their supposed democratic principles. David Ellison is clearly seeing what a success Elon Musk has made the MechaHitler site in Nazifying its dwindling user base, and he sees Rupert Murdoch’s idiot failsons making moves at Fox News and he wants to join the race for the right-wingification of all mainstream media. He clearly thinks he can take the esteemed CBS brand other people have worked hard to build, and do many capitalists’ favorite thing: make money off the back of other people’s labor with their bad ideas.

But this will fail because it is not serving the youthful audience Bari Weiss and David Ellison thinks it can. Per Pew, the only outlets whose median age are older than CBS News are Breitbart and Newsmax. Tucker Carlson, the hip young kingmaker in conservative media who just crowned a Nazi and set off a sectarian divide in the GOP, is the owner of a median audience of 57 years old. The median age of a primetime Fox News viewer is 68. There are not as many scientific measurements of The Free Press’s audience, but SimilarWeb’s two largest age buckets of readers for it are 55 to 64 (26 percent) and 65+ (20 percent) with the next largest cohort being 45-54 (17.55 percent).

This right-wing media pivot is not pivoting in the age direction the 2024 election convinced these people it is. They think they are modernizing major brands when they are really just picking the bones of a previous era. We are effectively watching a rich old boys club fund their idiot kids’ pursuit to build their fathers an echo chamber to retire in.

Here’s a simple example to show you how David Ellison just made up a number and called The Free Press a success. It made $20 million in revenue at the time of its purchase that valued the site at $150 million. The question of whether The Free Press is actually worth $150 million is easy to answer with another question.

Is The Dispatch worth $75 million?

If your response is “uh…what is The Dispatch,” you’re probably not alone, but it’s a very good comparison. They are a conservative outlet run by Steve Hayes, formerly of The Weekly Standard and Jonah Goldberg, previously of National Review. They bought SCOTUSBlog earlier this year and expected that to bring in $1 million in revenue. The Dispatch made $5 million in revenue last year and project $10 million for this year, which would put their valuation between $37.5 million and $75 million at the same revenue multiple that David Ellison paid for The Free Press. Would you pay $75 million to talk to an AI trained off SCOTUSBlog?

Let’s use another example at Axios where we actually know the revenue multiple the company is worth. They were sold to Cox Enterprises in 2022 at a $525 million valuation on $100 million in revenue. At The Free Press 7.5 times revenue multiple, that would make an actual news organization that breaks real news worth $750 million, meaning that Cox got it at a 30 percent discount by Free Press math. What a steal!

This is not the only market setting transaction of late, as Business Insider bought Morning Brew in 2020 at a multiple of 3.75 revenue. A lot goes into company valuation and it’s not just a multiple of your revenue, but there is a pretty clear market value in this industry–somewhere around five times your revenue is about your worth as a media company assuming no debilitating debts–and yet, David Ellison’s Free Press math comes out around 50 percent higher than market value. I know this may come as a shock to some who had faith that maybe this scion of generational wealth wasn’t a complete numbskill, but I have bad news to report about what the math says, as well as the aggregate failson math across America.

So no, The Free Press is not worth $150 million, not even close. As Mark Stenberg wrote for Ad Week when they bought it at this expensive multiple, they knew this and that Paramount “is not buying The Free Press for its profit stream today. Instead, it is making an investment in an outlet whose positioning, talent, and potential to scale could swell dramatically when plugged into the broader CBS News platform.”

And its “talent” since then has posted then deleted the worst John Oliver impression any person has ever done, gooned to AI virgin slop in public, and its superstar has wandered around CBS News with her own miniature Praetorian Guard, firing Black staffers and reassigning white ones while every failure and embarrassment of hers is leaked the moment it leaves her lips. At David Ellison’s CBS, you are currently watching the Hindenburg just as the first flame burst from its tail, brought to you by The Free Press.

This era is the death rattle of mainstream media for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Bari Weiss, but the attempted right-wingification of it by Larry Ellison’s doofus son is not going to capture the zeitgeist by inviting Dan Brown on to discuss heists at the Louvre. This is all so embarrassing for everyone involved, and the only certainty is that some wealthy people are going to lose some money during a time of grand media opportunity as they all compete for a shrinking space with an aging audience that in large part, is just a competition for second place in the right-wing media future that The Daily Wire and its billion-dollar valuation has already won the long game for anyway.