Jon Stewart is still poking the bear with his comments about his Trump-friendly new boss, Skydance owner David Ellison.
Only weeks after sarcastically questioning whether show hosts should “get to a point where we’re all just fired and hired by the same guy,” Stewart took aim at Ellison once again on Sunday. “We will all end up working for just one person. And it will be an Ellison, most likely,” Stewart said at 92NY’s “Unplugged” event in conversation with MTV cofounder Tom Freston, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“Am I being fired?” Stewart quipped, “Talk-show host is a very tenuous business right now… I don’t know if there was a tweet that went out from the FCC right now,” he added, referencing Brendan Carr’s propensity for tweeting threats against Trump’s late-night detractors.
Stewart renewed his contract with Paramount, now a Skydance company, earlier this month, locking in his post at The Daily Show for another year.
However, it hasn’t stopped the host from expressing his feelings about Ellison’s closeness with MAGA. Since Ellison reportedly has his sights set on acquiring Warner Bros., Stewart offered up another large dose of sarcasm.
He told Freston Skydance “is a fantastic company. I cannot speak more highly of them. I think they should gobble up all of them—and hand them directly to the president.”
Ellison installed conservative journalist Bari Weiss as the new head of CBS News after Skydance acquired Paramount—raising questions about how an anti-Trump host like Stewart would fare after the takeover. The company had only months earlier axed Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show within days of his accusing the company of bribing the president to approve the Skydance merger.
Stewart was uncertain he’d stick around at the time. “They may sell the whole f---ing place for parts, I just don’t know,” he said in July, before he secured a contract renewal this month. Though he remains on air, Stewart on Sunday expressed a longing for the days of old, when media wasn’t being sold for parts to Silicon Valley elites.
He told Freston of his early 2000s MTV days under his leadership, “You seemed to manage from the heart, always being thoughtful,” as opposed to the executives he now answers to at Paramount. “I don’t know that you feel the other humans in the room” anymore.
