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Former US Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called on BuzzFeed to cut staff, focus on video and hire new voices such as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after increasing his stake in the media company to 8.3 percent.
In a letter to the board on Tuesday, Ramaswamy criticized BuzzFeed for decisions he said contributed to “public distrust of the media,” including the publication of a dossier on former British spy Christopher Steele in 2017.
The website took a deep dive into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia without first verifying the information, some of which was debunked. Special counsel Robert Mueller later launched an investigation into the former president’s conduct and found no evidence that his campaign had colluded with Moscow to influence the 2016 election.
“Set yourself apart from your competitors by openly admitting your past journalistic mistakes and redefine the BuzzFeed brand around the pursuit of truth,” Ramaswamy wrote, calling on the company to hire editorial talent “from across the political and cultural spectrum.”
The biotech entrepreneur and anti-ESG activist said he saw a growing threat to the traffic that search engines and social media sites had directed to BuzzFeed as consumers turned to artificial intelligence tools, such as Google’s AI-generated answers to search queries.
He urged BuzzFeed to respond by hiring controversial and well-known figures from the audio and video industry, such as Carlson and talk show host Bill Maher, and to add three other unnamed directors to the board by July 15.
“No talent should be off-limits to platforms, hiring or acqui-hires,” Ramaswamy wrote. “While your competitors focus on racial and gender diversity in the boardroom, you can become the first media company to explicitly embrace diversity of viewpoints within its ranks.”
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in response that Ramaswamy had “some fundamental misunderstandings about the drivers of our business, the values of our audience, and the mission of the company” but would schedule a time to meet.
“I am very skeptical that it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a platform for inflammatory political pundits,” he wrote.
Buzzfeed’s stock has fallen from $40 a share in 2021 to under $3. The company is closing its news division in 2023 after social media companies like Facebook exited the news business and stifled referral traffic.
The revelation last week that Ramaswamy had built a multimillion-dollar stake in BuzzFeed led to a brief surge in shares, but at Friday’s closing price of $2.80 per share, the company had a market capitalization of just over $100 million.