The “Canceled” Man in Charge: Mike Richards Takes the Wheel at The Daily Wire
Four years after a scandal ended his 'Jeopardy!' career, the former game show wunderkind has rebuilt himself inside the conservative media company — and is now its CEO. In his first interview since the promotion, he talks layoffs, Ben Shapiro's numbers, Jonathan Majors' action-he…
In 2021, Mike Richards lasted one episode as the new host of Jeopardy! — following about a year as executive producer behind the scenes — before old podcast comments ended his tenure in a very public fireball.
Four years later, he is the CEO of The Daily Wire.
When we speak by phone less than 24 hours after The Daily Wire announcement, Richards, 50, sounds relaxed, energetic and eager to discuss growth, subscriptions, investigative journalism and what he repeatedly describes as “the audience.” The conversation occasionally drifts into culture war territory, but it mostly sounds like a veteran TV exec explaining programming strategy after a corporate restructuring — which is pretty much what this is.
Founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, The Daily Wire has spent the last decade evolving from a conservative commentary site into something much bigger and harder to pin down: a self-contained ecosystem attempting to rival mainstream media companies while openly rejecting many of their norms.
It has launched movies, children’s programming, documentaries, podcasts, investigative reporting and subscription streaming. In recent months, however, the company has weathered layoffs, internal turbulence and increasingly public ideological fractures on the American right — particularly around Shapiro, its biggest star by far, and his ongoing support of Israel through the war in Gaza, and now in Iran.
Richards now inherits all of it. Officially, he succeeds Caleb Robinson, who announced this week — to Richards’ surprise, it turns out — that he was stepping down as CEO after 11 years to focus on other projects while remaining on the board. Boreing, who co-founded the company alongside Shapiro and spearheaded pricey, ambitious projects like its Pendragon Cycle TV series — which the company admits was a dud with audiences — departed his own executive role more than a year ago.
Before his fall at Jeopardy!, Richards was one of the most successful producers in unscripted television, with credits spanning The Price Is Right, Let’s Make a Deal and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
Throughout our conversation, Richards seems aware of the symbolic weight of that comeback without ever explicitly saying so. He repeatedly frames himself as an “audience-first” producer who respects viewers in ways Hollywood no longer does. He speaks admiringly of Nashville, where he relocated with his family, describing it as “how I remember L.A. when I was a kid.” He insists he has no desire to become on-camera talent again, though he remains intensely performative, delivering polished riffs about producing, ratings and game mechanics with the ease of someone who has spent a lifetime understanding how entertainment works.
Most strikingly, he sounds less like a culture warrior than a network executive who has discovered a new constituency.
There are also reveals. Richards confirms that Jonathan Majors is starring in a sequel to The Daily Wire’s 2021 action film Run Hide Fight. Richards calls the sequel “a love letter to The Daily Wire faithful” and describes it as “a Red Dawn on a college campus situation.” In other words: the exile economy has officially become a business model.
Below, Richards discusses with The Hollywood Reporter his rise to CEO, the future of The Daily Wire amid layoffs and Shapiro in the crosshairs, Majors’ remake as a conservative action hero — and his thoughts on how Jeopardy! is faring without him.
You mentioned the word “unexpected” about this succession. So no one saw Caleb Robinson’s resignation coming?
Not anyone in the building. Caleb had been working with the board for a month and talking about how things would go and what that would look like. A lot of it was him wanting to make sure we had a great management team in place. He felt very confident in me and our CFO and our CMO and the rest of the management team. I didn’t know that’s where he was heading, but it had been in process for some time, I was told.
Yes. He has been doing this for 11 years. It is a stressful job. It is a 24-hour-a-day job. He has many, many children and he wanted to spend time with them. He’s still on the board. He still owns a huge chunk of the company. He’s still going to be very active. A lot of people say that when they step down and then it’s like, “See you never.” I was actually texting him this morning about something we’re working on. He is just taking a less stressful version of what he was doing.
You’ve been there about 19 months now. What have you actually been doing?
I’ve been president of entertainment during that time. I think a lot of people thought I was going to be very Hollywood-focused — competition game shows, stuff like that. Really what I focused on, right from the start, was the audience. I am an audience-first person. It’s why I’ve been successful running some of the largest franchises in television. It goes all the way back: I produced the fifth-grade talent show, even though I didn’t know what producing was, which meant I put the acts in the right order. Super exciting one at the beginning, long boring one next, quick changeover after that. My fifth-grade teacher has since reminded me that’s what I did.
And The Daily Wire audience — how do you view them? What makes them different from a network audience?
I actually love our Daily Wire audience. I respect them. They’re smart. They over-index in almost every positive category. I’ve never felt like I was better than them, which I think a lot of producers make that mistake. The focus over the last year has been on making content that gets right back to the core of what they want. When The Daily Wire is doing and saying things that no one else would — that’s when our audience reacts. That’s when we’re actually changing the country.
So what does that look like in practice?
Real History with Matt Walsh is a perfect example — us doing and saying things no one else would do. We made it as a subscription show and it’s driven tons of subscriptions. We put a couple episodes on YouTube and each one has gotten millions of views, each one improving on the last. We’ve also signed two new talents: Isabel Brown, who’s Gen Z and super smart, and Matt Fradd, a Catholic apologist who has doubled his audience since we brought him on.
What about Pendragon Cycle? That was the big bet on Hollywood-caliber scripted entertainment. I’m assuming you lost money on it and won’t be doing that anymore.
Pendragon is us at our most audacious. I wasn’t here when it was produced or green-lit, but it is us going all in on entertainment. I think it’s undebatably a good show. The guys at Angel Studios said it’s the most audacious independent TV project ever made. I agree. It did not land with our audience at the level we had hoped. It’s still on the platform, still drives subs. But it represents something we can be proud of and something we can learn from: Let’s make sure what we do going forward is even more missional and really lands with our audience.
We are in the movie business in a big way. We are expanding the Run Hide Fight universe with Run Hide Fight 2. It’s a big-time action movie — put a smile on your face, blowing things up, you know who the good guys are, you know who the bad guys are. Jonathan Majors is the star. He’s back to being badass like he should be. [Director] Dallas Sonnier is doing Dallas stuff, making crazy movies and blowing things up. When you see it, you’ll understand why only The Daily Wire could have made it. It’s like Red Dawn on a college campus. I even think there are some people on the left who will begrudgingly love it, because it’s that good.
Jonathan suffered a fall on set. How’s he doing?
He fell four inches out of a window — that is true — and he yelled, “We’re going to use that take, right?”
Let’s talk about Ben. He’s been under a lot of heat. What can you tell me about what’s actually happening with his audience?
He’s up 7 percent year-over-year across all platforms. All the reporting, all the sniping: as someone who lives in the numbers because it’s my job, we don’t even understand it. Some of the numbers are not as public as other numbers. When I’m looking at the numbers, I’m looking at how many people are listening on our own platform. It’s a big number. I’m looking at Spotify, Spotify video, RSS, and YouTube. The per-episode numbers are right where they have been.
Is it what it was in 2024? The most consequential, circus election in the history of the world, never to be repeated again, I hope? No. But across all platforms, which is what our business model is. That’s what makes us unique and so badass — we don’t just have to click-farm to succeed. He can drive hundreds of thousands of subscribers to our platform.
