Last month, Katie Miller, the wife of Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, sat down with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, for a friendly chat on her podcast. Sitting inside the federal agency between a pair of flags and a Trump meme mug, Miller offered Carr a warm platform to assail the “woke” media, threaten Disney’s broadcast licenses, and play a game of would-you-rather.
“Would you rather explain net neutrality to fifth graders, or have fifth graders teach you a viral TikTok dance?” she asked Carr, who responded with a chuckle and a “6-7” juggle with his hands, playing along with the supportive atmosphere.
The episode—which has drawn fewer than 5,000 views on YouTube—was emblematic of how Miller has used her platform to offer cozy, consequence-free safe spaces for Trump administration officials and some of MAGA’s biggest stars, including J.D. Vance, her former boss Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, and a rotating cast of Trump loyalists.
Yet, despite Miller’s extraordinary access to the people now steering the federal government, her show has attracted fewer than 60,000 subscribers, a striking sign of how little organic interest there is in these carefully stage-managed sit-downs designed to launder the image of officials carrying out Trump’s deeply unpopular agenda.
But Miller’s program has apparently become popular with one person, David Ellison, the billionaire Oracle scion who has used his father’s fortune to take control of Paramount and is now attempting to add Warner Bros. Discovery—and CNN—to his moguldom. On Thursday, Axios reported, in a piece so sanitized of context it initially failed to mention Katie Miller is married to one of Trump’s most influential lieutenants, that Ellison’s Paramount was in talks to distribute her podcast. The Atlantic later revealed that Miller has been in talks with Paramount brass for months to sell her show, even courting administration officials for Ellison’s dinner last month “honoring the Trump White House.”
A Paramount spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment when I reached out Friday. A Miller spokesperson declined to comment.
Across the media landscape, billionaire owners are plowing cash into low-wattage right-wing media personalities that often attract tiny audiences but serve a much more valuable purpose: flattering Trump by platforming his allies, and signaling loyalty to an administration that has made clear it rewards friendly coverage and punishes dissent.
As Status reported earlier this week, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has been investing heavily in a new video-focused opinion operation at The Washington Post under editor Adam O’Neal, an effort designed to transform the paper’s opinion section into a more personality-driven digital media machine. But despite posting dozens of videos to YouTube, the flagship “Make It Make Sense” series has amassed fewer than 600 subscribers, with episodes routinely struggling to pull in even a few hundred views. Under ordinary business logic, those numbers would trigger alarm. Instead, Bezos appears to be fine continuing to bankroll the project.
But with Bezos eager to accelerate his space ambitions in the second Trump-era, audience size increasingly appears to be beside the point. Ellison understands this especially well. In addition to eyeing Miller’s podcast, he spent some $150 million to acquire Bari Weiss’ Free Press and elevate her into a position of extraordinary influence over CBS News despite her lack of television management experience. The result has been nothing short of disastrous, with plunging ratings, logistical embarrassments, and an increasingly overt effort to reposition the network toward Trump-friendly coverage.
Of course, for billionaires with enormous business before the federal government, the dozens of viewers of The Post’s new opinion videos or the 4,600 others who tuned into Miller’s chummy chat with Carr are almost beside the point. The audience that matters is the one person whose goodwill Ellison and Bezos need to approve their deals. Under the current administration, that’s the only metric that seems to count.
