This story appears in the December/January 2025 issue of Forbes Magazine. Subscribe
The former Fox News star sounds off on the testosterone-fueled launch of his potent new nicotine pouch, Alp, and his quest to topple Zyn and restore “free men” in Donald Trump’s America.
By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff
Tucker Carlson ebulliently enters his barn in Bryant Pond, the small Maine village known for good trout fishing that’s now the former Fox News star’s headquarters. He glides past the pelt of a big game cat and bookshelves stuffed with a range of historical interests and titles that practically troll the browser, from Mark Tennien’s No Secret Is Safe to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to The Goebbels Diaries.
Fresh off bagging a few woodcocks, he removes a live 28-gauge shotgun round from his hunting jacket and begins hand-grinding coffee beans. It’s election day eve, and in a few hours, Carlson, who already voted for Donald Trump via absentee ballot, will get a haircut and fly down to Florida so he can watch the results from Mar-a-Lago with MAGA luminaries such as Elon Musk, Majorie Taylor Greene and, of course, the once and future president.
“I hope we’re successful and make a ton of money, but this isn’t a business play,” says Carlson, dipping his tongue into a small plastic container to retrieve two nicotine pouches. “This is rage.”
This is a notable statement for two reasons. First, on a day everyone else in America is focused on politics, Carlson isn’t discussing the election—he’s talking about the nicotine pouches he tucked between his lips, a brand he has just launched: Alp, of which he owns half, along with his business partner. Second, Carlson uncharacteristically undersells the larger picture in a polarized country: how, increasingly, partisan rage is the business play.
Yes, rage-driven profits have already been a proven media formula for most of this century, pioneered by Carlson’s former employers Fox News, then aped by everyone from Newsmax and OAN on the right to MSNBC and the Young Turks on the left. This decade has seen a similar cleaving in social media, from Trump’s own Truth Social as well as Rumble, which cloned Twitter and YouTube from the right, respectively. (Twitter, reborn under Elon Musk as X, has drifted this way as well.) Aside from almost $10 billion in combined market caps, these channels help fuel information echo chambers that may prove one of 2024’s most lasting (and civically dangerous) legacies.
Less noticed: a new ecosystem of startups of the Trump era that create customers by imbuing otherwise apolitical businesses with partisan tribalism. This goes beyond the vague and fuzzy associations of the old-school left—Ben & Jerry’s, Subaru—or the hucksters selling Trump commemorative coins on late-night television.
“I’m struck by the amount of fear in American life right now,” Carlson says. “‘Am I going to get fired? Get denounced on social media? Is somebody on TikTok gonna call me a racist?’ “
Instead, these are real companies selling goods and services that people use every day, primarily with a right-wing tint to a right-wing audience. Take finance: You can invest your money with Vivek Ramaswamy’s antiwoke Strive ETFs and bank at Larry Elder and Ben Carson’s Old Glory Bank. In retail, you can shop on Public Square, an online marketplace that features products made by companies that “respect traditional American values.” Donald Trump Jr. has joined 1789 Capital, a firm that invests in companies “building the next era of American prosperity,” including the Tucker Carlson Network, the New York Times reports. Even Rudy Giuliani, who has self-immolated his credibility with remarkable speed, has recently launched a line of organic coffee. As he says in his commercials, with Rudy Coffee, available in packaging that allows you to choose between his prosecutor days or his octogenarian self on the beach, “You’re also supporting Our Cause, the cause of truth, justice and American democracy.”
And of course there’s Mike Lindell’s MyPillow, which took a product everyone needs and turned it into the final personal statement—sales hit $300 million in 2019 but have cratered due to his 2020 election lies—that you can ponder every night before you close your eyes.
Now, thanks to Carlson, even your gums can have their own politically motivated pillow. While he objects to the notion that Alp, named after the European mountain range, is a political product, he simultaneously calls his pouch the “American Lip Pillow” and pitches it as a nicotine fix for the “free man.”
“There’s a kind of lightness to a free man,” he says. “A free person is not afraid, and he’s willing to laugh. I’m struck by the amount of fear in American life right now. It’s a very fearful country. ‘Am I going to get fired? Get denounced on social media? Is somebody on TikTok gonna call me a racist?’ There’s a fog of fear that settled over the country. And I think that fog is breaking.”
To Carlson, 55, this new venture is about more than standing up for his values. It’s using commerce to give the finger to, well, pretty much everyone. “It’s the entire world. It’s the entire pronoun world, the he/him, she/her bullshit world of corporate America that I just had it with,” he says. “I’m sick of it, and I’m not going to participate in it.”
Like Trump’s return to the White House, Carlson’s swift reinvention and return to relevance is a remarkable comeback story. Twenty months ago, his extremist views (often punctuated with what have been described as conspiracy theories and racist ideology), his open forum for fact-twisting election denialism (Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million) and his contempt for his superiors (he called one female executive the c-word in a private text) seemingly came to a head. Fox’s top brass sacked him without explanation despite the dominance of Tucker Carlson Tonight over cable’s 8 p.m. hour. (Carlson tells Forbes that he stands by the derogatory word he used against the executive, but clarified that he wasn’t being sexist—rather, he says he was using an “accurate description of this person” and he meant it “sincerely from the bottom of my heart.”)
Maine Man: Tucker Carlson at his barn in Bryant Pond, Maine, where he shoots his eponymous show—as well as a few woodcocks—and planned the launch of his new nicotine pouch, Alp. “This is not a conservative product,” he says. “This is a nicotine pouch. It has no politics.”
Jamel Toppin for ForbesAfter losing his high-profile platform on Fox News and the estimated $15 million–a-year contract that came with it, Carlson retreated to his home in the Maine woods and planned his comeback. Reinvention wasn’t new to him. “I have had the highest-rated show on TV, and I’ve also several times had one of the lowest-rated shows on TV,” he says.
Carlson was born and raised in California. His father was a respected journalist who became the director of Voice of America and later a diplomat. His mother left the family when he was 6 years old. His stepmother was an heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune, and Carlson wound up in a Swiss boarding school, where he developed a penchant for cigarettes.
He started his career as a magazine writer, his first big gig at Bill Kristol’s conservative Weekly Standard, for which he wrote sharp, witty features. His strong debating skills and stronger opinions led to his first TV job, at CNN, in 2000, where he cohosted the political debate show Crossfire and became known for his combative conservative politics and bow tie. Then came PBS and MSNBC, two outlets he now seemingly detests, before his first foray as a conservative entrepreneur: cofounding the Daily Caller website in 2010. In 2016, just in time for the Trump era, Fox News debuted Tucker Carlson Tonight, which eventually became the highest-rated cable news program in primetime until his messy departure in 2023.
Despite acknowledging that many of his critics see him as a “Nazi,” Carlson was not in a reflect-on-my-mistakes mindset as he plotted his next move.
“Our strategy [for Alp] is to get it in people’s mouths, by force, the same way they did the Covid vax.”
Instead, he doubled down on his stridency in December 2023, launching the Tucker Carlson Network, a streaming platform he describes as an alternative to corporate media “news coverage” that “has become a tool of repression and control.” He releases around a dozen two-hour episodes a month that generate millions of views, with napalm-style guests like felonious former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In February, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. There, he infamously admired Russian subways in the manner of a Soviet propagandist.
No matter: His tribe eats it up. When asked how much revenue his ad- and subscriber-supported network ($9 a month) generates, he’s quick, as is his wont, with an over-the-top joke: “I was beating one of my servants this morning with a cane and saying to myself, ‘Now that I’m as rich as I am, I don’t have to abide by any of the most basic rules of decency or human conduct.’ ” Forbes estimates that his network, which also hosts live events, generated at least $30 million in revenue this year—and with low costs, Carlson says he pockets more than he did when he was at Fox, with less work. “[Television] is dying,” he says. “And I can smell the decomposition.”
Though he no longer smokes, Carlson has an impressive nicotine habit—he pops in a new pouch about every half-hour. He says nicotine keeps him calm and alert at the same time, but one can almost hear his rapid heartbeat thudding from across the table and feel his hostility rising.
“I’m a pretty aggressive nicotine user,” says Carlson, who still has a baby face and signature floppy hair. He punctuates his points with a high-pitched laugh. “I doubt you’re going to find anyone who uses more of it than I do—from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep.”
Now he has put his money where his mouth is, launching Alp in November with the Louisville, Kentucky–based Turning Point Brands in the $3 billion nicotine pouch market. Carlson started using pouches five years ago—he calls himself a “sommelier of nicotine pouches”—a segue from decades of dipping, smoking, chewing and sucking on nicotine gum and lozenges. Along with his former college roommate and business partner Neil Patel, Carlson has invested a few million dollars into the 50/50 joint venture with Turning Point, a smaller tobacco-products outfit that took in $405 million in revenue last year selling its dip brand Stoker’s, Zig-Zag rolling papers and a lesser-known nicotine pouch called Fre.
His “aha” moment stemmed from rage. Long before he founded Alp, Carlson was a devout user of Zyn, the cult nicotine pouch that became a Republican talking point earlier this year after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, citing a potential new addictive threat to children, called for it to be banned and for the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the product. Carlson became the face of what Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the “Zynsurrection.”
Sober since 2002—when he quit drinking and drugs—Carlson is, by his own account, a nicotine addict. He once quit it for six months. “I gained, like, 40 pounds and became emotionally unstable,” he says. “That was fun.” So in the past few years, he became known as “Tucker Carlzyn” on the “Zynternet,” having previously touted Zyn on a popular podcast as a work enhancer—“once you try this, you will get a lot richer,” he said, adding that it is also “a male enhancer.”
Patel, whom Carlson met at Trinity College and who cofounded the Daily Caller, reached out to Zyn’s parent company, Philip Morris International—the behemoth behind the world’s best-selling cigarette, Marlboro—to see if it was interested in advertising on the fledgling Tucker Carlson Network. PMI sent the “douchiest, most corporate note back,” Patel says, explaining that it didn’t approve of how Carlson had been talking about its product. (The email from PMI, which Forbes has seen, was polite, if a bit stiff.)
Carlson took the perceived slight and turned his with-us-or-against-us worldview toward business. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that offended,” he says calmly before the venom emerges. “It’s unbelievably officious and nasty, humorless. It’s everything I dislike about modern America and corporate culture. It’s like your third-grade teacher scolding you. I’m an adult man. I’m not gonna be spoken to that way. I said to my college roommate, ‘I’m going to punish them for this.’ ”
So he declared war on Zyn. And on corporate America. And the morally outraged. And the politically correct. Unprovoked, Carlson rails about Bud Light’s 2023 ad campaign with transgender social media personality Dylan Mulvaney. “The idea that some company that makes a light beer should be trying to convince your kids to become trannies—that’s insane to me,” he says. “Just sell me the beer.”
The former pot smoker (from sixth grade through college, with a collection of Grateful Dead bootleg tapes to prove it) also has some choice words about cannabis: “I’m totally and adamantly opposed to smoking weed, because I think it makes you a pussy. It lowers your testosterone and makes you passive.” And the flexible morals of big corporations: “[Do you think Apple’s] Tim Cook cares who’s in power? You think he has strong ideological views on anything? No, of course not. He just wants somebody in charge who’s not going to call him on using slave labor to make iPhones.”
The President's Man: Carlson with Donald Trump at a live tour event in Arizona in late October. He flew to Mar-a-Lago on election night and has since had a say in vetting potential cabinet members.
chip somodevilla/getty imagesWhen pushed to talk about business strategy, he takes the opportunity to launch into a jeremiad about the pandemic. “Our strategy [for Alp] is to get it in people’s mouths, by force, the same way they did the Covid vax,” he begins. When his rant ends, he admits that his strategy is simple: Talk about the product on his show. One episode from November, which began with him popping an Alp in his mouth, was shot live from Mar-a-Lago on election night and rang up 3 million views. The easiest product to sell, of course, is an addictive one.
“I almost ran out of it yesterday on the road,” he says. “I called one of our employees. I was, like, ‘the FDA says this stuff is addictive. I can verify that I need some now.’ ”
A major hurdle for any new tobacco product is to receive the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization to be sold legally. The process is lengthy, expensive and full of obstacles. Zyn, and the half-dozen other nicotine pouches on the market, do not have the green light from the FDA, which means that technically they’re being sold illegally. The regulator has given companies a pass for now as long as they have filed a “premarket tobacco product application.”
The idea that a government agency has power over what Carlson can say about Alp, which comes in four flavors, including Mountain Wintergreen and Tropical Fruit, likewise enrages him. He has an especially intense hatred for the FDA, which he says is composed of “douchebags who work at the Department of Douchebaggery.”
He jokes—though with Carlson, every joke has a purpose—that nicotine raises testosterone, and this is why the government wants to throttle its sales and use, lest men get fueled by “increased awesomeness.” He brings up research that shows nicotine could have some promise in treating Covid, and says that he has given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. some Alp samples—so if Kennedy is allowed to “go wild on health” in the new administration, as Trump has put it, perhaps science can get to the bottom of it.
“[Alp] is so good and good for you—I think we’re not allowed to say that per the FDA—but the reservoir of hostility is so deep, I don’t want to tap into it,” Carlson says, nearly breaking out into laughter. “I’m trying to control myself. The ‘safe and effective’ people are lecturing me about health! Why don’t you go fuck yourself—how does that sound?”
The genius of Carlson’s testosterone- and nicotine-fueled diatribes is that, as in politics, he defines his competitors before they get the chance to define themselves. He points out (accurately) that according to Open Secrets, the majority of political donations made by employees of Swedish Match, the PMI subsidiary behind Zyn, went to Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden before that. (However, according to data from the Federal Election Commission, Swedish Match employees donated to Harris and Trump equally.)
A spokesman for PMI tells Forbes, “We’re bipartiZYN here and proudly made in the heartland of the U.S.—Owensboro, Kentucky.” (It should be noted that that Alp is made in India.)
By attacking the competition, Carlson sets up Alp as the alternative for a “real man” or “cool girl.”
“Everyone has had a girlfriend who drinks too much, and if you’re at an event, whether it’s a Taylor Swift show or a Dixie Chicks concert or a drag queen story hour, and she wants a nicotine pouch, I think a Zyn is probably a good choice for her,” Carlson continues, leaning back in his chair. “But [Alp] isn’t for that. This is for people who use [nicotine pouches] every day and aren’t ashamed of it.”
It’s all catnip for Carlson’s fan base—which, not coincidentally, leans more MAGA and male and likely to be interested in a nicotine pouch. (“Trump doesn’t hate nicotine pouches,” he says. “Kamala Harris does, and her party does, and they’ve said that they’re trying to regulate them out of existence.”) That Venn diagram—product meets audience—explains why partisan media outlets work, while no one should be awaiting an IPO from Rudy Coffee. And it speaks to an essential trait for any successful business: authenticity. “One area [on which] I disagree with Trump is I would never sell a product that I didn’t endorse,” Carlson says. “Trump used to sell Trump Vodka. Well, Trump doesn’t drink. How can you sell a product you don’t use? I wouldn’t do that.”
Carlson also balks at the connection between Alp and the litany of MAGA-era conservative brands. He understands that left-wing money is equally green, and he says this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. “It’s not like I’m going to sell nicotine pouches and then Giza cotton sheets,” he says. “I became very dissatisfied with the [pouch] I was using. I got a better one. It’s completely heartfelt. If this company were to go belly-up tomorrow, I would continue to have Alp pouches specially made for me, and I would use them, whether anybody else used them or not.”
For Carlson, Alp is a rejection of everything he hates in corporate America. “What’s my culture? It’s the country I grew up in,” he says, launching into one more lament designed to stoke the fires. “Why are you hassling a man over his minor vices? Just leave him alone.”
And with that, Carlson leaves his barn to relieve himself. There is a bathroom inside, but he says he prefers the freedom of the woods. “I don’t think I’ve taken a leak indoors,” he says. “Not one time.”
