Colbert’s Trump obsession cost CBS $40M per year in lost revenue.
Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was a financial catastrophe, burning through $100 million a year while racking up $40 million in losses, per 2025 reports.

Colbert’s show had become an anti-Trump soapbox since he took over in 2015.
Initially struggling, he leaned hard into “Trump resistance,” packing his guest list with left-wing firebrands like Sen. Adam Schiff and the Pod Save America crew. Every other word from their mouths was “Trump”

His monologues became a predictable litany of smug jabs. But his obsession grew stale, alienating viewers who wanted laughs, not lectures.

His 2.4–2.5 million viewers couldn’t save a show bleeding cash in a dying format, outpaced by YouTube and TikTok. He thought he could lecture America on leadership while his show tanked.

Colbert’s collapse shows you can’t run a show into the ground, antagonize your bosses, and expect to keep the mic.

Just three days before CBS announced its cancellation on July 18, 2025, with the final episode set for May 2026, Colbert made a catastrophic misstep. Returning from vacation, he publicly slammed his parent company, Paramount Global, for paying a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes lawsuit, calling it a “big fat bribe” to ease Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media. This outburst, coupled with his relentless Trump-bashing, exposed his obliviousness to the high-stakes corporate and political dynamics at play, sealing his show’s fate.

The Skydance-Paramount Merger Explained
The Skydance-Paramount merger is an $8.4 billion deal announced on July 7, 2024, to combine Paramount Global, a media giant owning CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount+, with Skydance Media, a production company behind hits like Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.

The deal would create a new entity called “New Paramount” worth $28 billion, involves two steps: Skydance, backed by the Ellison family (led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison) and Redbird Capital Partners, will pay $2.4 billion to acquire National Amusements, Paramount’s controlling shareholder owned by Shari Redstone. Then, Skydance will merge with Paramount, injecting $1.5 billion into Paramount’s balance sheet and offering $4.5 billion in cash or stock to shareholders ($23 per Class A share, $15 per Class B share). David Ellison will become CEO of the combined company, with former NBC Universal chief Jeff Shell as president. The merger aims to bolster Paramount’s struggling finances and position it as a tech-driven media player against giants like Netflix and Disney.

The deal requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees Paramount’s broadcast licenses, and is expected to close by October 5, 2025.

Facing a $400 million penalty if the merger fails, Paramount’s board had no room for an unreliable, quip-heavy loose cannon like Colbert.