PENN Entertainment recently sold Barstool Sports back to its founder and president, Dave Portnoy, in order to facilitate a new deal with ESPN to create the ESPN BET sportsbook. Portnoy and his brand had been under the auspices of PENN since the company acquired the remaining 64% majority share of Barstool Sports in a transaction worth $388 million in March 2023. From that time, the company felt limited in what it could disseminate and seems to have been putting its parent company at risk of potentially losing regulatory licenses.
The incident regarding Ben Mintz, a Barstool personality who uttered a racial slur during a podcast segment, underscores the differences in Barstool Sports when under control of PENN Entertainment. In a recent interview with former FOX News anchor Tucker Carlson posted to X, formerly Twitter, Portnoy divulged that the company was afraid that regulators would use the miscue against it, affecting its business interests.
“PENN was afraid – and this goes back to me a lot – that people who hate us so much [and] The New York Times was going to write a piece about it and they were going to make this a big issue; that’s what they were afraid of,” Portnoy said. “Whether that’s true or not, who knows?”
Upon reacquiring the company in a transaction worth $1 and incumbent on Portnoy agreeing to various stratified conditions, Portnoy immediately re-hired Mintz. In watching the video and conversing with Mintz, he was led to believe that it was an unintentional error and something that he instantly regretted. During the interview, Portnoy characterized it as a microcosm to look at a larger picture of the modern media ecosystem.
“I consider myself a rational, logical person,” Portnoy said. “You can tell when somebody is hateful and you can tell when somebody makes an honest mistake. There’s too much in this country – we’re outcrying and outraging over innocent, non-hateful stuff, and that’s what Ben got caught up in.”
Portnoy revealed that the company lost nearly $10 million last year, necessitating layoffs to ensure Barstool Sports became profitable again. Chief executive officer Erika Ayers Badan sent a memo to staff yesterday conveying their disappointment to have to lay people off – reportedly 25% of its 430-person staff – and implored other employers to hire the people, calling them “all-stars.” Yet Portnoy suspects that they may not be in the positions they are without the existence of Barstool and ability to freely create.
“I have a bigger heart than people give me credit for,” Portnoy said. “I’ve got these idiots at Barstool who have been with me for 15-20 years – the same people. If they don’t work for me – I don’t know – what are they going to do, bag groceries? They’re morons – they are truly morons. They fit in our circus in our moronic world.”
Having sold his company twice and becoming a staple of the modern sports media landscape and entertainment world, Barstool Sports has continued to see aggregate growth in key content metrics. The company recently celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special awards show from Boston, Mass., the metropolis where it was founded as a newspaper. Two decades later, the problem relates to the fact that the company finished last year in the red. Portnoy believes that he will be able to remedy it, pointing to its previous profitability every year under his ownership.
“It is a lot,” Portnoy said, referring to how much money the brand lost. “It’s a ton, but I’m rich and I can fix it. So if I have to lose money and pay for it for a month or two, fine, but we’ll get back to profit. We’ll have some layoffs, but we’ll get back to profitability pretty quick.”
