‘Made-Up Numbers’: Jimmy Kimmel Disputes Report Stephen Colbert Was Losing $40 Million a Year

(Photo Credits: Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on YouTube)

Jimmy Kimmel said he is not buying that his friend and former late night competitor Stephen Colbert was losing tens of millions of dollars per year for CBS.

“These are just made-up numbers,” the veteran ABC host said about Colbert reportedly losing $40 million per year.

He made that comment in a New York Magazine profile on Monday.

Kimmel said it didn’t make sense to him that CBS offered Colbert a multi-year extension in 2023 if the show was losing big bucks annually.

“Am I to believe that over the course of those two years, they suddenly started losing $40 million a year?” he asked rhetorically.

That’s the amount that was reported last year, soon after CBS announced it was ending Colbert’s Late Show in May 2026. CBS confirmed that figure last week in a statement that took a not-so-subtle shot at Colbert and championed his replacement.

“We’re proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue,” the network said in a statement. “With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing.”

The statement was shared with Variety and several other trades on Thursday.

That came a week after Colbert’s much-publicized swan song as the host of The Late Show. Colbert’s time slot was replaced by Allen’s Comics Unleashed, which has been syndicated since 2006; CBS is now leasing the airtime used by Colbert to Allen’s media company, which will handle selling all the ads.

Kimmel told New York that he also doesn’t buy that the late night format is fading into oblivion.

He said it was “silly” to say the late night was dying “if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings.”

“We’re not just dying of natural causes,” Kimmel added. “We’re being poisoned.”

He did not point to anyone or anything in particular that is poisoning the format.

As for his longtime rival President Donald Trump, Kimmel had this to say: “I don’t love him. I don’t hate him, either. I feel sorry for him. He obviously didn’t get hugged a lot.”

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