- CNN CEO Chris Licht claimed to lose nearly 50 pounds from diet and exercise.
- Now sources tell the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast’s Confider that Licht boasted of using Ozempic.
- It’s yet another bit of fallout from a disastrous profile of Licht in The Atlantic.
One of the odder interludes of the Atlantic’s long and damning profile of Chris Licht, CEO of CNN, were the intense morning gym sessions with Licht and his personal trainer. Licht told reporter Tim Alberta he dropped nearly 50 pounds over the last three years through a strict diet and grueling exercise regimen.
But according to the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast’s Confider, Licht has openly boasted about taking Ozempic, a diabetes treatment now touted as weight-loss miracle drug for those who can afford it.
According to sources close to Licht who spoke to the Daily Mail, the CNN boss championed Ozempic in meetings and told colleagues he was using it as far back as 2021 to get his weight under control. “He told me he was on Ozempic,” one source said. “So I was shocked when I read the Atlantic story and he was claiming it was due to a trainer and cutting meals.”
In the Atlantic profile, Licht, 51, boasted about his ascetic eating habits and intense early-morning workouts with trainer Joe Maysonet. “I’m a fucking machine,” Licht told The Atlantic, explaining why he was skipping a meal. Licht weighed 226 pounds in 2020 but dropped down to 178 pounds this March. He mocked his predecessor Jeff Zucker, saying “Zucker couldn’t do this shit” while squatting during a workout.
But Licht apparently said nothing to the Atlantic about the drug that sources say was key to weight loss.
“People read that paragraph in that Atlantic story and were floored he was leaving out the real secret to losing all his weight: Ozempic,” a source told the Daily Mail.
Confider, the Daily Beast’s media newsletter, also confirmed that sources have heard Licht boast about taking Ozempic.
The Atlantic’s 15,000-word profile of Licht, “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” has been a full-fledged disaster for Licht since it was published on Friday. Licht was forced to apologize to his staff on a Monday morning call. Reading the profile was was like “watching a snuff film” one media exec told Insider— a brutal dismantling of Licht’s leadership and already shaky standing at the network.
As another media exec told Insider: “Licht seems to be suffering the opposite PR problem as Zucker. Zucker had an army of image protectors and broke through them when he wanted to. Licht seems to have no one looking out for him — to tell him how grunting during a workout is, in this moment, going to make him look. He needs a handler — fast.”
“He should be planning his next gig,” a source said to the Daily Mail. “This was his opportunity to position himself as Ozempic’s Chief Marketing Officer. It’s clearly worked for him, he should own it.”
Matt Dornic, senior vice president of comms at CNN, did not respond to a request for comment.
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