Daily Wire Founders in Bitter Feud With Steven Crowder After Offering Him Shocking $50 Million Deal
The Daily Wire founders Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing are in a bitter feud with right-wing shock jock Steven Crowder after he called out the conservative outlet over their attempt to hire him in a shocking $50 million, four-year deal.
The blow-up began when Crowder released a video earlier this week accusing the Daily Wire of being “in bed with Big Tech.” While Crowder did not name Shapiro’s sprawling conservative media company, he railed against a contract he recently received from one that sounded very similar.
Crowder criticized terms establishing that if he couldn’t produce the content expected of his contract, or if his show was demonetized, gets content strikes, or removed from any video websites like YouTube, it would come out of his pay.
Crowder has been temporarily demonetized on YouTube in the past for his provocative commentary. He called the agreement a “slave contract” while accusing conservative media of being in cahoots with tech companies.
“We thought that we were all genuinely taking it to Big Tech,” he said. “But, too many of those in charge of the big conservative platforms are verifiably in bed with them. Big Tech is in bed with Big Con. The people you thought, the people I thought were fighting for you, a lot of it has been a big con.”
What Crowder didn’t say, but others were able to deduce, was that he was railing against a Daily Wire contract, which offered him $50 million over the next 4 years.
Boreing confirmed that huge number when he released a near-hour-long video to explain the offer while rebutting Crowder’s various misrepresentations about it.
While Daily Wire podcaster Jordan Peterson initially praised Crowder on Twitter, his tweet was taken down after the apparent feud came into public view. Shapiro also took to Twitter in order to encourage people to heed Boreing’s explainer on the term sheet they offered to his “friend.”
“We all wish [Crowder] nothing but the best,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro also spoke about the blow-up on his show, accusing Crowder of misrepresenting the terms of the contract and saying, “this is typically how contracts work.”
“If this show were to start losing money — this is true of my show. If my show loses money, and it loses The Daily Wire money, I lose money,” Shapiro explained. “It would’ve been precisely the same thing. If he had lost money in the ad space, and his show had lost money, then he also would’ve lost money because that’s how a joint venture works.”
While Shapiro again urged his audience to subscribe to Crowder’s projects, he reiterated the point that Crowder was wrong about details and intent of the contract.
“There is something rather nasty about attacking people who have been friends for over a decade…on the basis of your own misinterpretation of a document that offers you $50 million over the course of 4 years,” said Shapiro.
