Vivek Ramaswamy, the former US Republican presidential candidate, urged BuzzFeed to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson after building a stake in the struggling online media firm.
In response Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s co-founder and CEO, claimed Ramaswamy had “some fundamental misunderstandings” about its business, but offered to meet with him.
Ramaswamy, a prominent rightwing supporter of Donald Trump and frequent media critic, now owns 8.4% of BuzzFeed after disclosing his investment last week.
In a letter to BuzzFeed’s board in which he argued the business had “lost its way”, Ramaswamy – a biotech entrepreneur – called for a “major shift” in its strategy and vowed to buy more shares.
BuzzFeed, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in the early 2010s as it distributed viral stories across social networks including Facebook and Twitter (now X), has come under significant pressure as traffic from such platforms declined.
Shares in the group tanked after it went public on the stock market in 2021. It has laid off hundreds of staff, and shuttered its news division last year.
Aside from its main website, today BuzzFeed also owns HuffPost, the news site, and First We Feast, the food-focused site behind Hot Ones, the hit YouTube interview series. Earlier this year it sold most of Complex, a publisher focused on streetwear and pop culture, to Ntwrk for $108.6m – just over two years after buying the business in a $294m deal.
In his letter, Ramaswamy urged BuzzFeed to implement widespread job cuts to “get back to startup size”, and focus on video and audio. He also called on the company to own up to what he called its “past journalistic failures”, and drafted a statement for the firm to publish in which it apologized for previous coverage.
Ramaswamy, who made his name in politics lambasting the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, recommended that BuzzFeed “be bold” and recruit prominent conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as part of a bid to “challenge” its audience. His list of suggestions also included Bill Maher, Aaron Rodgers and Charles Barkley.
In his response to Ramaswamy, Peretti agreed that BuzzFeed was undervalued, but rejected the proposed solutions. “I’m very skeptical it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits,” he replied. “And we’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer prize-winning journalism.”
Shares in BuzzFeed rose 8% during early trading in New York on Tuesday.
