Don Lemon's show has witnessed a staggering decline in views after the initial breakout numbers the former CNN anchor garnered with his Elon Musk interview.
What Happened: Don Lemon Show's video views on X, formerly Twitter, have fallen off a cliff, with five episodes now out.
Lemon debuted his new TV show with an interview with Tesla Inc. CEO Musk and it went viral after the two had a fallout over the questions that Lemon asked.
According to an analysis of the number of views of Lemon's five episodes posted on X so far, the latest video has been viewed a little over 1% of the times that the Musk interview fetched.
The cumulative views of the four episodes Lemon posted after the Musk interview are less than 20% of the views that the Musk interview got.
So far, the Musk interview has over 2.3 million views, while the remaining four episodes have cumulative views of 453,600.
The fifth episode where Lemon interviewed Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield, has a little over 26,000 views. It aired on Monday.
For comparison, the last 10 episodes that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has posted on X have garnered nearly 60 million views so far, which is an average of 6 million views per episode – this is more than two times that of Lemon's most-viewed episode.
Note that this includes only full episodes, not smaller clips that Carlson has also been posting.
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The second episode, with veteran journalist Kara Swisher, also had multiple segments about Musk, and it is the second-most viewed episode on Lemon's show so far.
Why It Matters: The Lemon-Musk controversy erupted after the tech billionaire turned down a content deal.
While Lemon criticized Musk for canceling the deal after "months of begging and wooing," Musk described the host as "dull" and "underwhelming" after the controversial interview.
Lemon reportedly made some extravagant demands like a free Tesla Cybertruck, a $5 million advance over and above a salary of $8 million, an equity stake in X, and more.
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