The Bulwark: From Nonprofit to Profits

The Bulwark: Profiting from Never Trump Media (full series)
Birth of The Bulwark | From Nonprofit to Profits
Making a Business of Trump Derangement | Take Away Trump

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From Nonprofit to Profits

The DDT Institute tax filing for 2019, really the first year DDT Institute received serious money, lists total revenue of $3 million and expenditures of $1.6 million, nearly all of which appears to have been spent developing The Bulwark.

Almost $1.2 million was spent directly on The Bulwark. Co-founder Charlie Sykes, who produced 248 podcasts for The Bulwark in 2019, was paid $140,000 as the president of DDT Institute. Jonathan V. Last, a former editor and contributor at the Weekly Standard who is now the editor of The Bulwark, was paid $190,000 by DDT Institute as an independent contractor in 2019.

In 2020 the DDT Institute reported collecting and spending $2.9 million, with The Bulwark again commanding most of the money. Almost $1.3 million was spent directly on The Bulwark, with Last ($197,083) and Sykes ($126,875) paid as editor-employees. Longwell Partners, a management firm owned by Sarah Longwell, was paid $391,516.

Who provided those millions of DDT Institute dollars? The specific original source for most of the DDT/Bulwark funding during this period has not been publicly reported, and because of donor privacy laws, it does not need to be.

The largest single known donation was for more than $1 million, but it came from the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund in 2019. Fidelity is America’s largest donor-advised fund, managing more than 350,000 separate individual charitable funds, and it is not required to publicly disclose the names of its individual donors.

The John Pritzker Family Fund reported a $225,000 donation to DDT Institute in 2019. Pritzker is a private foundation connected to one of the wealthiest families in America. Also in 2019, the Pritzker fund gave to lefty climate extremist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Carbon 180.

The New Venture Fund reported a $125,000 donation to DDT Institute in 2020. New Venture is one of seven left-wing nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors. A November 2021 report from The Atlantic described Arabella as a “massive progressive dark-money group.”

According to the DDT Institute’s 2021 report to the IRS, the nonprofit sold The Bulwark to Center Enterprises in August 2021 for $100,000. The report also notes the firm is “more than 35%” owned by Sarah Longwell. (The DDT Institute also reported more than $1 million in expenses for The Bulwark for the months preceding the sale.)

The Bulwark website now states that it is owned by “Center Enterprises, Inc.”

The funding model is now advertising and reader support, via the Substack subscription platform, and a lot of content is behind paywalls. The basic membership is $100 annually, with a “Founding” level that provides access to additional content for $300 per year.

As of March 2025, The Bulwark reported nearly 90,000 paid Substack subscribers, which at a minimum of $100 each equates to $9 million annually (Substack takes roughly 10 percent of that.) An additional source of revenue is a YouTube page, “bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month,” according to New York magazine. So that’s an additional $1.8 million or more per year.

“After several years of breaking even,” noted the New York report, “The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024.”

The financial guesstimates noted above are very conservative and do not account for advertising payments, merchandise revenue or $300 annual payments from an unknown number of premium subscribers. Whatever the annual revenue, the $100,000 paid to the nonprofit DDT to create the for-profit media firm currently looks like a bargain for the purchaser of The Bulwark.

From the Weekly Standard camp, Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark and appears to be the primary manager. Bill Kristol is listed as “editor at large” and is a regular contributor.

Sarah Longwell is a regular contributor and is listed as the publisher.

Podcast host Tim Miller was described by the New York report as “the most outward-facing member of The Bulwark” and “a political strategist who worked as a top aide to Jeb Bush during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

That would be the campaign in which Trump squashed Jeb. As one possible motive for some people joining the Never Trump side, consider this New York Times headline from February 2016: “How Jeb Bush Spent $130 Million Running for President With Nothing to Show for It.”

Another well-known Never Trumper on the team is Mona Charen, a conservative commentator since the 1980s, who is titled as The Bulwark’s policy editor and host of her own podcast. Similarly, though not a conventional Never Trumper, libertarian journalist Cathy Young is also a frequent Bulwark contributor.

As it has prospered, The Bulwark has grown its staffing beyond Never Trumpers to simply anti-Trump journalists, such as managing editor Sam Stein, formerly of Politico and other regime media properties. Longwell announced Stein’s June 2024 hiring with a statement claiming he “has successfully built out several newsroom operations.”

“We’ve gone very slow,” said Jonathan V. Last to New York, regarding what looks like a hiring boom over the past year. “We didn’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to stand up a reporting vertical and hire ten people.’ Because I’d say after the trauma of having [the Weekly Standard] closed down on me, the thing I care about most in the entire world is never having to lay anybody off.”

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In the next installment, The Bulwark build its business on Never Trump “journalism.”

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-bulwark-part-2/