Five years ago, Candace Owens was a mid-tier political operative working for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Now, she’s a globally famous conservative firebrand with one of the fastest-growing independent media platforms in the U.S., raking in cash through controversy. But the same contrarian playbook that launched her solo career now threatens the media empire she built. Her company generates up to $10 million in revenues per year, according to an analysis by Fortune, implying that the company’s valuation would be multiples of that.
The conservative podcaster and provocateur is facing a high-stakes defamation lawsuit filed by French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron. The suit is set to test whether the controversy-as-currency oeuvre that made her rich, and gave her a media brand that reaches tens of millions of people, can survive what experts say will be an immensely costly legal battle.
The 219-page complaint, filed in Delaware Superior Court in July 2025, accuses Owens of orchestrating a “campaign of global humiliation” by promoting the conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron was born male.
The plaintiffs’ weapon of choice: Clare Locke, the law firm that extracted a record-shattering $787.5 million settlement from Fox News on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems—the largest media defamation payout in American history. The Macrons vehemently deny Owens’ allegations. Owens has vowed to fight the suit.
Interestingly, the suit essentially alleges that spreading false information is essentially Owens’ business model.
The complaint names three defendants: Candace Owens personally, Candace Owens LLC (her Delaware company managing social media and ad revenue), and GeorgeTom, Inc. (presumably named after her husband George Farmer, who is directly involved in the business and operates her website and podcast distribution). In naming all three parties, the suit takes aim not only at Owens personally, but also her entire known business infrastructure.
“If ever there was a clear-cut case of defamation, this is it. Relying on discredited falsehoods originally presented by a self-proclaimed spiritual medium and so-called investigative journalist, Ms. Owens both promoted and expanded on those falsehoods and invented new ones, all designed to cause maximum harm to the Macrons and maximize attention and financial gain for herself,” a spokesperson for Clare Locke told Fortune in a statement. These claims are also reflected in the complaint against Owens.
“Despite the irrefutable evidence that was provided to her on multiple occasions, she not only persisted but doubled down on her attacks. To make matters worse, many others have republished her lies, thereby increasing their global audience and the emotional and reputational harm they have caused. It is clear that for Ms. Owens truth is irrelevant. This lawsuit is about bringing that truth to light and seeking justice for the Macrons by holding Ms. Owens to account. We are confident that the facts are on our side and look forward to proving her liability in court,” the firm said.
Owens did not respond to repeated Fortune requests for comment.
Millions on the line
Fortune studied public business records of Owens’ business holdings, researched the podcast economy, and spoke to legal and media experts to develop insight into what Owens stands to lose in her legal battle.
Understanding what’s at stake starts with the scope and structure of her business empire. Her brand sits squarely inside the booming conservative independent media market, which has exploded over the past five years. The scale of that economy helps explain how Owens has accumulated substantial wealth through her media ventures.
The conservative media and influencer ecosystem has become one of the most lucrative corners of the creator economy, characterized by substantial advertising rates, distinctive monetization strategies, and revenue potential that often surpasses mainstream influencer markets. The Daily Wire—Owens’ former employer, which is also considered a benchmark for the industry—generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2023, with comparable estimates for 2024. It has also grown into a diversified media operation with more than 1 million paid subscribers to its streaming service, DailyWire+, and pulled in $22 million from e-commerce alone that year.
Advertisers have followed the conservative media appetite and money. The top 10 advertisers working exclusively with conservative podcasts are now spending a combined $5 million per month—nearly four times their average monthly spend in 2023, a November analysis from Bloombergfound. Advertising rates for the top conservative podcasts, experts told Bloomberg, range from $10,000 to more than $100,000 per ad read. By contrast, left-leaning podcasts with sizable YouTube audiences—like MeidasTouch (5.5 million subscribers), The Majority Report, and The Bulwark (under 2 million)—typically secure only a few thousand dollars per ad slot.
The brands fueling this surge, from Birch Gold Group (which spent roughly $10.8 million on conservative podcast ads over the past year) to PreBorn (an anti-abortion group that spent $13.1 million since 2023), view conservative hosts as indispensable marketing channels. Many of these companies lack mainstream advertising avenues; their customer base lives inside this ecosystem.
“It’s the golden age of political content creation right now,” Howard Polskin, president of TheRighting, which reports on conservative media, told Fortune. He pointed to the ability of independent right-wing content creators to earn tens of millions of dollars through solo ventures, rivaling the revenue being generated by mainstream media competitors like NewsMax which reported $43.3 million in revenue last quarter.
“The cold, hard reality is that right wing media generates millions of dollars and has roughly half the country under its spell,” Polskin added. This power can prove extremely lucrative for the power players in the market. George Farmer, Owens’ husband, told Bloomberg that advertisers on her show allegedly reported seeing returns of two-to-one on dollars spent, and up to five-to-one in some cases.
Right-leaning podcasts may command substantially higher ad rates because they have amassed larger and more engaged followings than their left-leaning counterparts, as a 2025 report from Media Matters found. But also, these audiences may be more likely to buy from ideologically driven brands, yielding better returns for advertisers. Following former president Joe Biden’s election, Republicans increasingly flocked to politically aligned products, a 2024 Columbia Business School study found.
Right-wing brands pay notably high CPMs (cost per thousand impressions: a metric for online advertising that measures the cost to display an ad 1,000 times)—rates liberal creators don’t receive, according to Bloomberg. For shows with more than 100,000 downloads per episode, mid-roll ads typically fetch CPMs of $25 to $50, equating to $2,500 to $5,000 per ad, data from digital marketing firm Design Rush found. At Owens’ peak volume of roughly 3.5 million downloads per episode, even conservative CPM estimates put a single sponsorship read at $50,000 to $175,000—and she runs multiple sponsors per show.
For Owens, this creates a direct financial incentive: the more provocative the content, the higher the audience engagement, the higher the ad rates. Conspiratorial and provocative content “blows up because people want to go deep and ‘uncover’ hidden truths and be a part of the investigation. That’s what Candace is doing, and that’s what she was doing with the Macron claims,” Angelo Carusone, president and chairman of left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, told Fortune. Put simply: Controversy drives views, views drive sponsors, and sponsors fund her entire operation.
Controversy as a business model
Before the Macrons filed their defamation suit, Owens had quietly built one of the most successful independent media machines in conservative politics. After a contentious split from Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire in March 2024, allegedly sparked by a slew of on-air antisemitic comments and staunch criticism of Israel, she launched a solo venture that quickly scaled into a multimedia operation.
The Daily Wire did not respond to a Fortune request for comment. Owens has previously characterized her firing from the media venture as a matter of principle where she presented herself as a truth-teller who refused to bow to institutional pressure and later accused the Daily Wire of launching a “smear campaign” against her.
Owens’ star power lies in her dynamism. The once-Democrat founded the “BLEXIT” movement (a campaign for Black voters to embrace conservatism and leave the party), and is what Carusone calls a “talented storyteller.” She is also somewhat of a Renaissance woman. “She is appealing to a segment and satisfying a demand right now which is that you can be a modern woman and a mom, but also embrace traditional roles and ask hard-hitting questions and not be shot down for it,” he said.
Her digital footprint is vast. According to left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, her follower and subscriber base grew by more than 9 million across platforms this year alone. Her self-titled podcast Candace, which debuted in June 2024, became a breakout hit: in October 2025, it ranked No. 1 globally across platforms in downloads and views per episode, averaging 3.5 to 3.6 million downloads per show, a report from podcast analytics platform Podscribe found.
While she sits at No. 28 in the U.S. by weekly listener reach—behind giants like The Joe Rogan Experience and Crime Junkie—her per-episode performance is exceptional. Her YouTube channel has 5.58 million subscribers and more than 1.1 billion total views, regularly drawing 500,000 to 2 million views per video. This year alone, it has amassed more than 617 million views. Third-party analytics by content creation insight platform VidIQ estimate the channel generates between $118,000 and $353,000 per month in revenue alone—potentially $1.4 million to $4.2 million annually before costs.
Across social platforms, Owens holds an additional 6.9 to 7 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and more than 5 million on Instagram, giving her a combined social media reach exceeding 10 million. That audience size puts her in league with major television personalities—and gives her distribution power rivaling traditional media outlets. ABC’s Good Morning America, for comparison, draws only an average of 2.59 million viewers per episode, according to Nielsen.
Her podcast is the financial engine. According to Bloomberg, Owens’ show had the highest ad density among eight major conservative broadcasters studied—more than 90% of episodes contain host-read ads. She has roughly 60 sponsors in rotation, featuring the marquee names of the conservative advertiser universe: PreBorn; Birch Gold Group; The Wellness Company, which promotes ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as pandemic-preparedness medications; Seven Weeks Coffee, which donates 10% of purchases to crisis pregnancy centers; and PureTalk, a conservative cellular carrier.
Her husband, who oversees much of the business, told Bloomberg that only one advertiser, he claimed, has pulled out in the past year.
Speaking fees add another lucrative income stream: Owens commands $50,000 to $100,000 for in-person appearances and $10,000 to $20,000 for virtual events. Merchandise sales and book royalties contribute additional revenue. Taken together—and given that podcast sponsorships alone could generate $2 million to $10 million annually depending on volume and rates—realistic estimates place Owens’ total yearly income in the low- to mid-single-digit millions. Exact figures, however, remain private.
A family business
Structurally, Owens runs her business through two Delaware-registered entities: Candace Owens LLC, which manages her social accounts, and GeorgeTom, Inc., which produces her podcast. She employs fewer than 20 people, according to Delaware business filings reviewed by Fortune, though the exact number of employees isn’t disclosed, Owens’ husband is a key player in her operation.
Farmer, the son of Lord Michael Farmer, a British metals trader nicknamed “Mr. Copper” who founded the Red Kite Group hedge fund, grew up in aristocratic wealth. His father’s net worth is estimated to exceed $190 million.
Farmer served as CEO of Parler, the conservative social media platform, from 2021 until stepping down in April 2023 after a turbulent tenure that included a failed acquisition attempt by Kanye West. He’s also a shareholder and director of GB News, the Fox-imitating British broadcaster that has received over $90 million in funding from backers including hedge-fund tycoon Paul Marshall.
The Macron complaint alleges Farmer is connected to GeorgeTom, Inc., the Delaware corporation operating Owens’ website and podcast. While ownership percentages aren’t disclosed, the family businesses appear to be intertwined—and so, potentially, are the assets. Owens herself has been somewhat upfront about Farmer’s role in her venture, specifically as it relates to his responsibilities.
“She has really been fairly firm in that she doesn’t touch the business, she doesn’t think about the business and mechanics. She really relies on George Farmer,” Carusone told Fortune. Instead, he said, her focus is on being the talent and nexus of the Candace brand.
This disconnectedness, Carusone said, may contribute to her seeming disregard for libel suits. “Whatever she’s done structurally, she doesn’t seem terribly concerned about her entire life falling apart,” he added.
Farmer’s work experience is likely the driving force of this ease and may prove to be a saving grace for Owens.
“The genesis of Parler was that it was supposed to be a social media place that was not going to be susceptible to the types of economic, financial, and social pressures that the elites, the tech companies, the liberals, were putting onto tech at the time,” he told Fortune. “That experience, there was a recognition internally that they needed to do something, or they wanted to do something that was going to be that would allow them to operate unabated by traditional, typical market forces. And obviously that unraveled in a lot of ways, but I don’t think it would be shocking to me if lessons incorporated from that did not factor into whatever Farmer and Owens are doing now to insulate themselves from, from certain types of civil accountability.”
While the exact methods through which Owens and Farmer may have protected their assets remain unknown, Carusone suggested that one option available to the pair may be to set up a network of trusts to insulate their finances.
The Owens calculus
The lawsuit itself presents its own set of challenges for both the Macrons and Owens. But recent judgments, including the $1.4 billion in damages levied against fellow right-wing personality Alex Jones who promoted conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre, demonstrate a willingness of juries to hold independent media personalities responsible with substantial financial penalties for their actions. Likewise, in 2016, a Florida jury bankrupted the original Gawker blog with a $140 million judgment for invading the privacy of the late wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Jones’ representatives did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.
The biggest hurdle the Macrons face is that they must prove that Owens made her statements about the French first lady with “actual malice,” Sonja West, first amendment expert and law professor at the University of Georgia, told Fortune. That means they will have to show that Owens either knew what she was saying was false or acted with reckless disregard as to whether her statements were false.
“But even if Owens can show that she believed her statements were true when she first made them, the fact that she has continued to repeat them, even after the Macrons pushed back with potential evidence showing their falsity, could weaken her defense,” West said. “Even though we have broad protections against defamation lawsuits by public figures, the Supreme Court has said that we don’t have a First Amendment right to deliberately ignore evidence that contradicts our claims.”
If Owens were to lose, West explained, she has millions on the line in legal fees alone. In the case of Alex Jones, a Florida judge estimated the legal fees and court costs for the Sandy Hook families to be $320 million. In terms of damages, she said the amount would depend on several factors: the concrete harm the Macrons can prove (such as lost business opportunities or speaking fees), the scope and reach of her statements, and how many times she repeated them.
“Given that she had no evidence, because there was no evidence, it’s easy to see how the plaintiffs will be able to prove actual malice, and then that opens the possibility of getting not just presumed damages, but punitive damages,” Lyrissa Lidsky, First Amendment law specialist and professor at the University of Florida law school, told Fortune. “So the question is, are juries tired of media irresponsibility in a way that might make them want to send a message?”
It appears, however, Owens isn’t scared of the potential consequences. She has asked her fans to donate to her legal fund, estimating her court battle will run her $5 million, while she continues to spread claims about the Macrons. In the past week alone, she has accused the Macrons of funding a $1.5 million assassination plot against her to be carried out by France’s National Gendarmerie Intervention Group—claims she says she has reported to the White House and FBI. Authorities from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group told French media these allegations were false, stating that their operations focus on counter-terrorism, fighting crime and hostage recovery.
“Just because you’ve been irresponsible in your speech in the past doesn’t mean that we have judicial orders saying you can’t speak in the future,” she explained.
After all, Jones continues to be in business despite declaring bankruptcy, suggesting that even the most staggering financial penalties can’t derail the economics of right-wing media.
And the trial itself will likely bring in substantial revenue for Owens from the controversy alone by driving engagement through viewership with her various monetized media channels. Because of this, Carusone believes the conservative online personality may even come out on top, even if she loses the lawsuit.
