What is Tucker Carlson's net worth and salary?
Tucker Carlson is an American political commentator, author, and TV personality who has a net worth of $50 million. Tucker was a CNN commentator from 2000 to 2005. From 2005 to 2008, he hosted a show on MSNBC. He went to work at Fox News in 2009. He began hosting a nightly talk show called "Tucker Carlson Tonight" in 2016.
On April 24, 2023, Tucker was fired from Fox News. The departure, which came one week after Fox paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, sent shock waves through the media industry. In a strange twist, Don Lemon was abruptly fired from CNN on the same day.
Outside of television, Tucker is the co-founder of the website The Daily Caller. He is also a published author and columnist. On May 9, 2023, Tucker announced he would be launching a new show on Twitter. By doing so, he opted to forgo an estimated $25 million that was owed to him on his Fox News contract. More details on this and other Tucker contracts in the next section.
Salary & Fox Contract
Tucker Carlson's peak Fox salary, which was earning at the time of his firing, was $10 million per year.
When Tucker went from a weekend correspondent to taking over Bill O'Reilly's former prime-time 8 pm weeknight slot, his salary was increased from $2 million to $6 million per year. And while that may seem like a big bump, O'Reilly had been earning $25 million. Tucker soon was significantly outperforming O'Reilly in terms of ratings.
Tucker operated under that contract through February 2021, when he signed a 3-year extension that increased his salary to $10 million. This extension expanded Tucker's deal to include a podcast made up of interviews from his show and monthly originals under the banner "Tucker Carlson Originals."
In the months before his sudden firing, Tucker had been negotiating a new contract extension that would have kept him at Fox through 2029.
What happens next with Tucker and Fox?
If Fox was looking to NOT pay him the remainder of his contract ($10 million per year for another 2-3 years), they would have had to prove that Carlson was fired for cause. If that were able to prove that, Fox could have booted Carlson without paying him any more money.
On the other hand, Fox might actually have wanted to keep Tucker under contract to prevent him from joining a rival network for the remainder of his deal (2-3 years). In other words, Tucker could have chosen to continue to earn $10 million per year under his former contract, but he would not be allowed to appear on any other networks or rival news media outlets. He likely would also not have been permitted to host a podcast, produce specials, or publicly disparage his former employer.
And on May 9, 2023, we got our answer!
Tucker opted to opt out of his Fox contract and forge ahead independently with a new show on Twitter. Assuming he was owed $10 million per year for the roughly 2.5 years that were left on his Fox contract, Tucker opted to forgo $25 million in guaranteed earnings to be let out of his former deal.
Early Life
Tucker was born in San Francisco but was raised mostly in Southern California. His father was an LA news anchor and ambassador to the Seychelles named Richard Warner Carlson. Tucker's mother left the family when he was just six years old. When Tucker was 10, Richard married Patricia Caroline Swanson. Patricia was exceptionally wealthy thanks to her grandfather, Carl A. Swanson, who founded the Swanson frozen foods empire.
He attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1991.
Success
His work as a journalist began in print at publications such as Policy Review and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. From there, he landed gigs as a columnist for periodicals like Reader's Digest and New York Magazine. He also has appeared in newspapers and magazines like Esquire, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Daily Beast. Carlson began his career in TV as one of the hosts of the CNN panel discussion program Crossfire. On this show, Carlson generally took up the position of the right-wing point of view.
His most notable work during this period was during a contentious interview with comedian Jon Stewart, which many analysts believe directly led to Crossfire's cancellation soon after. Since then, Carlson has found jobs on both of CNN's primary competitors, MSNBC and most recently on Fox News.
For many years, Carlson was famous not only for his sometimes idiosyncratic conservative views but his trademark bow tie. Wearing a bow tie was often referred to as "the Tucker Carlson look."
In 2017, Tucker took over the slot that Bill O'Reilly left vacant after he was fired from Fox News. Within a few years, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" was the highest-rated show on Fox News by a significant margin. With an average nightly viewership of 3.4 million, Tucker had more viewers than his CNN and MSNBC counterparts combined.
On April 24, 2023, Tucker stunned the media world by announcing he had left Fox News effective immediately and his final broadcast was the previous Friday, April 21.
Book Deal
Around the time of his elevation at Fox News, Tucker signed a lucrative book deal. The deal was reported to be worth $15 million and covered several books. Carlson's "Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News" came out in 2003. In 2018, he released "Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, and in 2021, "The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism."
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Daily Caller
In 2010, Tucker and Neil Patel co-founded DailyCaller.com, a right-wing news and opinion property. They positioned it as a conservative version of The Huffington Post. In June 2020, Tucker sold his 1/3 stake to Patel for an undisclosed amount.
Personal Life
Tucker has been married to Susan Andrews since 1991. They met (and later married) at the chapel of St. George School, a boarding high school in Middletown, Rhode Island. They have four children. Carlson is left-handed and dyslexic.
For nearly a decade, Tucker and his brother Buckley have been embroiled in a lawsuit related to their estranged mother's estate. Their mother, Lisa Vaughn, was the beneficiary of an oil and gas partnership in rural areas of central California that covered a combined total of 70,000 acres of land. At one point, the brothers thought the royalty rights were worth a fairly insignificant amount of money, maybe $125,000 at most. They eventually learned the rights were worth a minimum of $2.5 million. They sued their late mother's estate which expressly left each brother the nominal amount of $1. That lawsuit is reportedly still unsettled as of this writing.
Real Estate
The Carlsons split their time between their Florida home and a home located on his family's property in Maine. In 2011, Tucker and Susan traded down from a $4 million home to a $2 million home in the Washington D.C. neighborhood of Kent. They sold that house for $2.04 million in November 2017.
In July 2017 they bought a new house again in the same neighborhood of Kent for $3.895 million. They put this home up for sale in July 2020 for $3.95 million, a slight increase. They sold the home within a month at asking. They reportedly decided to sell the home after a group of protestors came onto the driveway and even rang their doorbell.
In early 2020, Tucker paid $2.9 million for a home on Gasparilla Island in Florida. In mid-2022 they paid $5.5 million for a second home on Gasparilla. The properties, which are located side-by-side, are within a community called Boca Grande.
