Comcast Is Putting MSNBC Up for Sale?

A rumor that media company Comcast put its cable network MSNBC up for sale in November 2024 was circulating online late in the month.

For example, the Facebook page American Liberty posted the claim on Nov. 22, along with the caption: "Anyone got any spare change?" The text in a screenshot shared by American Liberty read:

Comcast is putting MSNBC up for sale. CNN just announced massive layoffs coming.

Maybe the new owners will figure out that lying non-stop to your audience is a lousy business model.

(Facebook/American Liberty)

Some social media users seemed to interpret the story as real. One comment read: "Well,Comcast's and spectrum both need to also go out of business. To many paid services the cable companies are becoming a thing of the past."

Even the son of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appeared to believe the rumor. Donald Trump Jr. reshared the claim on X on Nov. 22, tagging the platform's owner, Elon Musk (archived).

Musk replied by asking how much MSNBC cost (archived).

Notably, Musk's acquisition of X began with a 2017 post in which he said something similar (archived).

However, there was no evidence that Comcast intended to sell MSNBC. Likewise, no credible news outlet reported on such a story, which would be eminently newsworthy if it was true.

Snopes contacted MSNBC and Comcast to ask if the claim was true and we will update this article if they reply.

Rather, the rumor about the supposed sale of MSNBC was amplified by an X account known as WallStreetMav, which states in its bio that it posts memes and covers finance, economics and news.

Snopes contacted WallStreetMav for a comment on the source of its claim and will update this article if we receive a response.

The claim then appeared on American Liberty, a Facebook page associated with America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) — a network that describes its output as satirical in nature. America Liberty's profile page states: 

A subsidiary of the ALLOD network of trollery.
Nothing on this page is real.

However, the fictional story began to spread on X after Comcast said it was thinking of including MSNBC — along with other networks it owns, such as SyFy, Bravo and CNBC — in a new stand-alone "spinoff" company designed to address the growing trend of "cord-cutting," where viewers give up their cable for streaming subscriptions. Comcast later confirmed that it was launching this spinoff company.

This news seemed to be widely misunderstood, however, as many assumed the spinoff meant that Comcast was selling MSNBC and other networks. Social media accounts and websites that spread fake news and satire then used the public's confusion to claim that MSNBC was up for sale.

Snopes has addressed similar rumors from ALLOD in the past, including the claim that a woman had placed four mail-in ballots in a drop box in Pennsylvania and the assertion that MSNBC presenter Rachel Maddow had burst into tears and left the set. 

Further, we fact-checked a video purporting to show Maddow crying because Musk was buying the network.