Megyn Kelly said she considered moving to CNN from Fox News after then-network boss Jeff Zucker made what she described as a “huge offer.”
Kelly, who now hosts “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast, said she ultimately decided against taking the offer because she didn’t think she would be able to bring her Fox News fan base over to the left-leaning network.
She made the comment during an interview on Friday with conservative commentator Buck Sexton. The interview was transcribed by the news site Mediaite.
Kelly recalled that when she departed Fox News in 2017, she seriously mulled jumping ship to rival CNN.
“I considered going to CNN,” according to Kelly. “CNN made me a huge offer. Huge.”
Kelly instead opted to sign on with NBC News, where she hosted a morning talk show that ended up getting canceled due to low ratings and controversy.
Kelly said she chose not to go to CNN because she didn’t think she would have a sizeable audience there.
“I said no, Buck, because I knew: Who is my fanbase going to be over there? I knew who my fans were and I knew that my Fox viewers were not going to follow me to CNN and that the CNN viewers were going to hate my guts,” she said.
Kelly said Chris Wallace, who departed Fox News for a show on CNN+, the fledgling streaming service that has drawn very few subscribers, is “suffering from that very problem right now.”
She said she was surprised that Wallace left Fox News because he managed to earn a substantial, multimillion-dollar annual salary even though “he was in last place [in the ratings] every week, every year, every month.”
“He was always in last, and they still paid him,” Kelly said of Wallace and her former bosses at Fox News.
Kelly also lambasted CNN executives for conceiving of the idea of CNN+ in the first place.
“Who is the moron at CNN who actually thought, ‘You know what we need with our ratings in the toilet? More of us. We need more CNN,’” Kelly said.
Sexton echoed the sentiment, adding: “I do love all of the jokes about how while Elon [Musk] is offering to buy Twitter for tens of billions, there are lots of people out there right now who are willing to buy CNN+ for tens of dollars.”
Zucker stepped down abruptly as president of CNN earlier this year after revealing that he failed to disclose a years-long consensual relationship with a subordinate, Allison Gollust, who was his chief marketing officer.
Gollust resigned a short time afterward.
