Chris Ruddy, Newsmax’s founder and CEO.
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Conservative news outlet Newsmax went public on Monday morning on the New York Stock Exchange. By the end of the day, its shares were trading 735% higher than its $10 offering price, and the company was valued at $10.7 billion. The stock surge, which caused trading to be halted at least 10 times, has also made its 60-year-old founder and CEO, Chris Ruddy, a billionaire.
“Today marks a historic milestone for Newsmax as we transition to a publicly traded company,” Ruddy said in a statement announcing the listing. “This incredibly successful offering, combined with our previous preferred offering, provides us with the capital and financial freedom to accelerate our growth initiatives, expand our programming and further enhance our digital presence.”
According to Newsmax’s offering document, Ruddy owns 31% of the company, worth an estimated $3.3 billion at the closing price of $83.51. He owns all of the Boca Raton, Florida-based firm’s Class A shares, which grant 10 voting rights per share compared to one vote per share for holders of Class B shares, which were offered to the public. Representatives for Newsmax did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Newsmax raised $75 million in the IPO, adding to the $225 million it raised in a private placement in February at $5,000 per share. Ruddy isn’t the only one who won big in the listing: stock brokerage billionaire Thomas Peterffy owns an 18% stake in Newsmax worth an estimated $1.9 billion. It’s unclear when Peterffy invested in the company, and a spokesperson for him declined to comment.
Other major investors include Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, with a 15% stake worth an estimated $1.6 billion, and Ukrainian businessman Vadim Shulman with a 4% stake worth an estimated $361 million. Al-Thani reportedly invested $50 million in Newsmax between 2019 and 2020, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. A representative for Al-Thani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite its fast-paced growth, with revenues more than tripling between 2019 and 2022, the last couple of years haven’t been a resounding success for Newsmax. The company recorded a $42 million net loss on $135 million revenues in 2023, more than double its losses in 2022 when revenue was the same. It’s too early to tell if 2024 was a more successful year: The firm reported a $56 million net loss on $80 million in revenue in the first six months of last year. It estimated full-year revenues at $171 to $173 million in its investor presentation but hasn’t announced final results yet.
Newsmax also took a hit in September when it agreed to pay a $40 million settlement to voting machine maker Smartmatic, after Smartmatic had sued the company in 2021 alleging Newsmax spread false claims about it in relation to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Newsmax has paid out $20 million of that settlement so far, according to its IPO disclosure, and the remaining balance will be paid by March 31 and June 30 this year. The network is still fighting another lawsuit from voting machine firm Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the company for $1.6 billion in damages in August 2021, alleging that Newsmax defamed Dominion in its coverage of the 2020 election. That case is still ongoing, with Newsmax stating in its IPO disclosure that it is “vigorously defending” the suit.
Aside from the legal troubles, Newsmax claims its total viewership increased by 22% last year compared to 2023. Besides its cable news channel, it also has an online news site, a news app, a paid subscription service named Newsmax Plus and print publications including Newsmax Magazine and Newsmax Health & Money.
Before starting Newsmax, Ruddy grew up in suburban Long Island and got a bachelor’s degree in history from St. John’s University in New York and a master’s in public policy from the London School of Economics. He then worked in journalism at the New York Post and as a national correspondent for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where he first met Richard Mellon Scaife (d. 2014), a billionaire heir to the Mellon banking fortune who owned the paper.
Ruddy founded Newsmax as a digital news site in 1998 with a $25,000 investment from Scaife, and the pair then raised $15 million from 200 private investors. By 2009, they had bought out those investors, and Ruddy owned 60% of the firm at the time with Scaife holding 40% as a silent partner. Newsmax launched a cable channel in 2014, and it’s now grown to become the fourth-largest news channel in the U.S. with 30 million regular viewers in the last three months of 2024, according to data from Nielsen cited in Newsmax’s public filings.
“Fox News had more than half of the cable news market,” Ruddy said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday, recalling when he decided to launch the cable news network in 2014. “I thought to myself, ‘Newsmax has a great digital brand in the center-right market, and they have no competition.’ I think there was a demand for more competition against Fox.”
Newsmax still has a long way to go to beat Fox: It pulled in 524,000 viewers in February compared to Fox’s 5.1 million, according to Nielsen cable news ratings. But Ruddy is confident that the firm is on an upward trajectory and has ambitious plans to expand beyond the news business.
“We see ourselves as a growth stock,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We have the cable channel, we’re still growing that. We have Newsmax 2, our streaming channel. It’s reaching about 15 million people regularly. We have the [Newsmax] Plus service, which we see as a competitor to Netflix for family-friendly news and entertainment.”
Besides owning the largest stake in the company, Ruddy can also thank Newsmax for a few other perks: The firm pays his car lease payments and auto insurance, according to its disclosure filing, and also reimbursed the costs for his apartment in New York until last August, when the firm leased its own corporate apartment in the city for Ruddy’s use when he works out of Newsmax’s New York office. Ruddy owns a home worth an estimated $620,000 in West Palm Beach, Florida, which he purchased for $215,000 in 2002.
Newsmax is the latest conservative-focused company to ride a wave of retail investor enthusiasm to an eye-popping valuation. Chris Pavlovski, the founder of right-wing video platform Rumble, became a billionaire in December as the firm’s shares soared by more than 100% after it announced a $775 million investment from crypto giant Tether. (Forbes estimates he is no longer a billionaire, with Rumble’s shares falling by 43% since the beginning of the year.)
No one has benefited more from that boom than President Donald Trump. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., the parent company of his social media venture Truth Social, is now valued at $4.3 billion (market capitalization) despite recording a $401 million net loss on just $3.6 million in revenues in 2024. Still, Trump’s stake in the firm is worth $2.6 billion, making up more than half of his estimated $5.1 billion fortune.
Ruddy entered the media business long before Trump entered politics. In 2009, he told Forbes that Newsmax viewed the world “through the eyes of Ronald Reagan.” But he has since come around to America’s 47th president. On March 25, he posted a photo of Trump on X calling him from the Oval office. “I shared with Potus my new saying,” he wrote. “‘A rising Trump lifts all boats!’”
