Even though Glenn Beck fired 30 percent of his staff at his dwindling media enterprise the Blaze Thursday afternoon, he still managed to keep his personal chef on the company payroll.
The Daily Beast reported that employees who were related to Beck’s close friend Robert Shelton managed to escape the bloodbath of job cuts, including Robert’s son Matthew Shelton, who is Beck’s personal chef.
Another family member who managed to survive the mass layoffs was Shelton’s daughter Bailey, who kept her job as a makeup artist.
In a meeting with the remaining employees of the company Thursday, Beck stressed that the job cuts he made were strictly for business reasons and not for any personal reasons.
“There are no sacred cows, no ‘friends of Glenn,’” Beck said, a witness of the meeting told the Beast. “Nobody is here because they’re good at kissing my ass.”
This is not the first time Beck laid off a large number of employees. In April 2016, Beck laid off 40 employees of the site to “satisfy the requirements of a multi-million-dollar bank loan” Beck took out to keep his struggling media enterprise afloat.
The loan came around the same time Beck purchased a $200,000 Maybach sedan and a private jetliner.
The struggling conservative media enterprise has had issues over the past three years with declining ad revenue, a sharp drop in web traffic and subscribers, less reach for the television network as cable distributors dropped the subscription-only channel from their lineups, and management troubles.
In August 2016, Beck sued the former Blaze CEO Christopher Balfe for $13 million for alleged breach-of-contract, fraud, and other claims. Balfe counter-sued, noting in his complaint that Beck had become “erratic” and “paranoid,” frequently “referring to himself as Walt Disney.”
The following month, the cash-strapped media enterprise shut down its film and TV production company, American Dream Labs.
A report from October 2016 noted that the Blaze’s editorial department dropped from 25 employees to six employees during the height of election season.
Part of the reason for the slump in business for the once-successful media outlet was due to Beck’s failure to embrace President Trump in the primaries and the general election. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the “Never Trump” movement, putting him at odds with much of his conservative audience.
He used his bully pulpit to lash out at those who supported Trump, including Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, Ted Cruz, Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, and even Republican voters.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.