Tucker Carlson’s Media Company Secures Investment Led By New ‘Anti-Woke’ Firm 1789 Capital
Firm co-founded by Omeed Malik invests in ‘parallel economy’ of conservative-friendly companies
Five years ago, Omeed Malik was a self-described “run-of-the-mill corporate Democrat,” with a seat on the Council on Foreign Relations, a summer house in the Hamptons, and stints at Bank of America and white-shoe law firm Weil, Gotshal under his belt.
Then Covid happened. Chafing under government mandates he found illogical and corporate limits on speech that felt to him like censorship, he moved from Manhattan to Florida and began hanging out with Republican donors. He discovered a business opportunity in a so-called “parallel economy” of conservative-friendly companies.
Now, he is one of their financiers. Malik this year launched 1789 Capital, which aims to capitalize on the opportunities that it sees left open by the “wokeness” of more traditional sources of capital.
Its first fund, with a modest $150 million, made its initial investment Monday, leading a $15 million seed round with other private investors into Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel’s new media company. Carlson and Patel’s company has been registered in Nevada under the holding company name Last Country, Inc. Malik is familiar with Carlson and Patel, having invested in an earlier media venture of theirs, the Daily Caller.
The goal of 1789, which is named for the year the Bill of Rights was written, is to get Carlson and Patel’s company to the point of showing a proof of concept for its online video-driven business model, so the pair can continue raising the hundreds of millions of dollars they are eventually targeting, people familiar with the matter said.
Malik thinks some right-leaning business ventures have failed to sustain mass appeal because they didn’t have sophisticated financial backers.
“What has happened up to now is you’ve had some rich benefactor, who is ideological, put a company in business, but then there is no institutional support to continue to finance that business,” Malik said. Silicon Valley venture firms operate with that level of sophistication but typically don’t want to be affiliated with conservative companies, he said.
Malik’s fund is small compared with the giants of the venture-capital world, with their multibillion-dollar funds, so the scope and scale of investments he can make is limited. And he will be facing competition for the most promising firms he targets.
The Carlson investment is structured as a SAFE, short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, a common arrangement pioneered by Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator that often doesn’t assign a valuation to the startup, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Carlson and Patel’s venture will be driven by subscriptions but also offer a stream of free online videos of Carlson, a former star at Fox News, and other talent. Already, Carlson has been posting free video content on Elon Musk’s X, such as his high-profile interview with Donald Trump that streamed during a recent GOP presidential debate.
Through connections formed via the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization run by Chris Buskirk that seeks to connect conservative megadonors with entrepreneurs and tech leaders, Malik teamed up with co-founders Buskirk and Rebekah Mercer to create 1789 Capital.
“The whole vision is to create the next media company that is purpose-built for the 2020s and 2030s, in a way that Fox and Rupert [Murdoch] and Roger [Ailes] built a cable news business that was really purpose-built for its time and place,” Buskirk said.
The investment in Carlson and Patel’s venture is part of 1789’s thesis of “EIG” investing, short for entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. It is meant as a response to the ESG—or environment, social and governance—ethical investing standards that have been championed by funds such as BlackRock as good business but have sparked a backlash on the right.
Malik sees the addressable market as, at minimum, the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump. Entrepreneurs targeting this market point to the market value lost when Bud Light lost its place as the bestselling beer in America after consumers organized a boycott in response to collaboration with a transgender influencer for marketing.
“Where’s the money going to go?” Malik said. “I want us to be the beneficiary of it.”
His fund sees opportunities within three buckets: the “parallel economy” of companies like Carlson’s that use existing business models to reach more right-leaning consumers; “deglobalization,” or companies that bring jobs and technology back to the U.S.; and “anti-ESG,” or companies that can’t get loans because of what Malik calls the “ESG cult.”
“What we are focused on is opportunities that we think have developed in the market because other forms of institutional capital have become politicized,” Buskirk said. He pointed to the challenges that many defense startups face in getting funding because some traditional venture-capital firms are prohibited by their investors from investing in weapons.
1789 is finalizing its next investment in Firehawk, a startup that makes 3D-printable rocket fuel for missiles that it claims is safer and cheaper than traditional methods, according to the 1789’s founders. Firehawk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blake Masters, who serves as an adviser to 1789 and ran for the Senate in Arizona as a Republican, compares the current moment to the one in 2014, when he co-wrote the bestselling startup bible “Zero to One” with Peter Thiel, which asked the question, “What valuable company is nobody building?”
“What valuable company is nobody investing in? I think that answer is very likely at any given time to be an ideologically right of center company,” Masters said.
In addition to 1789, Malik runs a bank, Farvahar Partners, which he describes as “apolitical,” and a special-purpose acquisition company that recently merged with PublicSq., a commerce platform for what it describes as patriotic Americans.
1789 joins a movement of businesses aimed at the MAGA side of an increasingly fragmented marketplace, from Black Rifle Coffee to Truth Social to Rumble, all three of which either went public via SPAC or are pursuing doing so. Such firms served as inspiration for 1789, Malik said.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate whose Strive Asset Management has become famous for its critique of corporate “wokeness” and recently crossed $1 billion in assets under management, takes credit for starting the conversation.
He called Malik, who has been a supporter of his campaign, “an intellectual” who has the “curiosity and depth” to challenge the status quo.
“I feel like I spawned what I think is a new cultural current in American business,” he said.