Bari Weiss is seeking a valuation of more than $200 million for her media startup, The Free Press, and has held talks to sell her 3-year-old venture to Skydance chief David Ellison, expected to soon be the new owner of Paramount and the CBS News division, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.
Weiss is seeking up to $250 million in a potential deal, according to FT.
Ellison is eager to pair The Free Press alongside CBS News, provided the Skydance-Paramount merger is approved by federal regulators, according to the report.
Weiss started a personal Substack newsletter in 2021, months after resigning as a columnist from The New York Times for not conforming to the one true opinion of the woke employees she says forced her out.
“My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’ ” Weiss wrote in her open resignation letter. “My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. … Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”
Weiss cofounded The Free Press in 2022 with her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, carving out an anti-woke and anti-cancel culture voice that was positioned between mainstream media outlets on either side of the political spectrum.
She secured seed investment from venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, according to the report.
The Free Press boasts a younger, digital-savvy audience that has reached 1.25 million subscribers to Substack, with 155,000 of them paying, president and publisher Dennis Berman told Axios in April.
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