Ben Shapiro Built a Conservative Media Empire, but Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens Are Pulling It Apart

On his Rumble show this morning, Nick Fuentes sat at his desk in an “America First” hat and declared victory. “Guys, after nine long years, nine years, we won. We finally won.”

The Daily Wire had laid off roughly half its workforce two weeks earlier. In 2017, Fuentes was 18 years old, pulling about 100 viewers a night on Right Side Broadcasting. Ben Shapiro was at CPAC, building an empire alongside Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, and Matt Walsh that would clear $100 million a year. “Nobody was even questioning Israel,” Fuentes said. “We’re all Groypers now.”

Shapiro built the most dominant anti-woke media empire of the 2010s. The very figures he has spent months denouncing as moral imbeciles, intellectual cowards, and conspiracy grifters are the ones the market is crowning.

The Daily Wire, the company Shapiro co-founded in 2015, was approaching $200 million in annual revenue by 2024, with over a million paid subscribers. It had been expanding into high-cost streaming with films, kids’ content, and a 7-episode Arthurian fantasy series called The Pendragon Cycle. The expensive “conservative Disney” push didn’t hit.

On May 1, 2026, the company laid off roughly half its workforce. Shapiro is reportedly looking for buyers or investors. His main YouTube channel has lost an estimated 85% of its monthly views since its 2023–2024 peak. The website’s traffic was cut in half over the past year.

The audience moved to creators more extreme than Shapiro.

Tucker Carlson left Fox in 2023 and built his own network. His shows now average 56.8 million views per episode across platforms. His coverage of the February 2026 Iran conflict pulled 1.53 billion total views in 8.5 weeks. He interviewed Nick Fuentes for over 2 hours in October 2025.

Candace Owens left The Daily Wire in March 2024 after clashing with Shapiro over Israel. She has called the firing a gift. Her independent podcast now ranks in the global top 10. She has leaned harder into conspiracy theories since the split.

Nick Fuentes is a self-described white nationalist with a history of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He was banned from major platforms for years. He has been reinstated on X and now has more than 1 million followers there. Shapiro called Carlson’s October 2025 interview with him an act of “moral imbecility.”

The MAGA base has been shifting away from neoconservative foreign policy for years. Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025 accelerated it. The February 2026 Iran conflict accelerated it more. The Daily Wire’s pro-Israel position became a liability in an audience increasingly isolationist.

Shapiro had been calling out the trio for months. He called Carlson an “intellectual coward” and a “super spreader of vile ideas” for the Fuentes interview. He called Owens’ theories about Charlie Kirk’s death “hideous and conspiratorial nonsense.” On May 6, 2026, days after the layoffs were announced, he posted on X: “On the show today: Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and the rest of the New Left remove the mask.”

The audience read those attacks as proof the targets were saying something worth hearing. Owens mocked the Daily Wire layoffs in real time. Posts crediting the audience shift to Shapiro’s pro-Israel stance racked up tens of thousands of likes.

Today, both sides went to their cameras. On the same Rumble show, Fuentes recorded a shorter clip addressing Candace Owens. “Here we are, reuniting on Daily Wire’s grave,” he said. “We’re like Bonnie and Clyde.”

On his YouTube show, Shapiro fired back. He acknowledged 13% layoffs since January, fewer than the roughly 50% other outlets have reported. He pointed to Pod Track data showing The Daily Wire reaches 41 million people per month across 11 shows, ranked 6th globally.

He called Fuentes “a confirmed Nazi” and Owens “the ranting bag lady of the internet.” He framed the story as a coalition of the media left and the “woke right” working to destroy traditional conservatism. He noted that Russia Today, the Kremlin’s official outlet, had retweeted Fuentes’ victory lap today.

The Daily Wire remains the biggest traditional conservative media company. But every attack Ben launches feeds his audience to the people he is attacking, attention is a parasitic beast.