Who Owns MS NOW? Versant, Brian Roberts’ Votes and Life After Comcast
MS NOW, the network formerly called MSNBC, is owned by Versant Media Group, a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: VSNT) that Comcast spun off on January 2, 2026. Comcast is no longer the parent: its shareholders got the Versant stock, and Comcast chairman Brian Roberts kept a special class of shares that carries a third of Versant’s votes.
So there are really three answers. Versant owns the channel, public investors own most of Versant, and Roberts holds outsized voting power with a tiny economic stake. The independent chairman and CEO who run it are different people again.
Key takeaways
Who is the new owner of MSNBC?
Versant. Comcast announced in late 2024 that it would split most of NBCUniversal’s cable channels into a separate company, and the deal closed on January 2, 2026. Comcast shareholders received one Versant share for every 25 Comcast shares they held, and Versant started trading on the Nasdaq on January 5.
MS NOW sits alongside CNBC, USA Network, Golf Channel, E!, Syfy and Oxygen, plus digital businesses like Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes and GolfNow. The company is based in New York and led by CEO Mark Lazarus, who previously ran NBCUniversal’s cable entertainment group.
NBC and NBC News stayed with Comcast. That’s why the channel had to give up the “NBC” in its name.
Why is MSNBC splitting from NBC?
Because Comcast wanted to separate its shrinking cable channels from the businesses it sees as its future. When the plan was announced in November 2024, the Associated Press reported that the networks being spun off had brought in about $7 billion of revenue over the previous 12 months, roughly 5.5% of Comcast’s total, while viewers kept cancelling cable for streaming.
Comcast held on to Peacock, Bravo, its film studios and theme parks. It pitched the new company as a possible partner for, or buyer of, other media businesses, which gives Versant a reason to exist beyond managing decline.
Why did MSNBC change its name to MS NOW?
Once the network left the NBCUniversal family, keeping NBC’s brand no longer made sense, and NBC News correspondents weren’t coming with it. The channel switched names on November 15, 2025. According to Adweek, MS NOW stands for “My Source for News, Opinion and the World.”
The “MS” is a leftover from history. MSNBC launched in 1996 as a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC; Microsoft later sold out and NBC took full control long before the spin-off. Under president Rebecca Kutler, the network has been building its own newsgathering team so it no longer depends on NBC News crews.
Who owns MS NOW’s parent, Versant?
This is where the answer gets more interesting than “public shareholders.” Versant has two classes of common stock, copied from Comcast’s structure. According to Versant’s Q2 2026 quarterly filing, there were 138,792,303 Class A shares and 377,775 Class B shares outstanding as of July 31, 2026. Each Class B share carries 15 votes, and the class is guaranteed 33⅓% of the combined vote.
Those Class B shares trace straight back to Brian Roberts. Comcast’s 2026 proxy says Roberts has sole voting power over its Class B stock, worth 33⅓% of Comcast’s votes, and the spin-off handed out Versant shares to both Comcast share classes at the same one-for-25 ratio. The result is a near carbon copy of his position at Comcast.
| Versant share class | Shares (July 31, 2026) | Share of equity | Share of votes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class A (public) | 138,792,303 | 99.73% | 66.67% |
| Class B (Roberts) | 377,775 | 0.27% | 33.33% |
Run the numbers and the imbalance is striking. Class B is about 0.27% of Versant’s shares but 33.33% of the vote, roughly 120 times its economic weight. At the current share counts, one Class B share outvotes about 184 Class A shares.
A third of the vote isn’t majority control. Roberts can’t push decisions through alone, but a guaranteed third of every shareholder vote gives him heavy weight in board elections and any major deal. Voting power and ownership are not the same thing here, and that gap is the whole story.
Class A · 99.7% of shares · 66.7% of votes
Class B · 0.3% of shares · 33.3% of votes
MS NOW’s ownership chain after the Comcast spin-off, using Versant’s July 2026 share counts.
Who is the largest shareholder of MSNBC?
It depends whether you count votes or money. By votes, Brian Roberts is the biggest single holder with 33⅓%. By economic stake, the leaders are the two giant index-fund managers, most of whose Versant stock came from their Comcast positions.
BlackRock reported 16.4 million Class A shares, or 11.6% of the class, in a Schedule 13G/A for June 30, 2026. Vanguard now files through two separate units: Vanguard Portfolio Management with 8.9 million shares (6.17%) and Vanguard Capital Management with 7.7 million (5.38%), both as of March 31, 2026.
Add Vanguard’s two filings together and it holds about 16.6 million shares, a touch more than BlackRock, so the two are effectively tied, though their filing dates are three months apart. On votes, each stake works out to only about 8% of Versant’s total, against Roberts’ 33⅓%.
Who runs the company day to day is a separate question. David Novak, the former Yum! Brands CEO, left Comcast’s board in January 2026 to become Versant’s chairman. Mark Lazarus is CEO, and MS NOW’s editorial leadership reports up through him.
How is MS NOW doing financially?
Versant doesn’t split out MS NOW’s revenue or profit, so nobody outside the company can say exactly. What the filings show is the picture for all its networks combined.
Versant reported $1.64 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, down 3.8% from a year earlier, and $211 million in net income. Most of that came from fees cable and streaming distributors pay to carry its channels ($954 million), followed by advertising ($423 million). Alongside the results it raised its 2026 revenue outlook to $6.2 billion to $6.45 billion.
The business has a clear headwind: people keep cancelling cable, and distribution fees follow subscribers down. Distribution revenue fell 6.3% in the quarter, which Versant put mainly down to subscriber losses. It’s answering with buybacks (about $200 million in the first half of 2026), a $0.375 quarterly dividend and a push into digital.
MS NOW is one of its brighter spots. Versant said the network’s second-quarter viewership rose 14% year over year, that June was its seventh straight month of year-over-year audience growth, and that it ranked No. 1 among news organizations on YouTube that month.
For comparison, it’s a different setup from the network’s main rival, where the Murdoch family’s control of Fox News also rests on a dual-class share structure. And unlike Paramount’s sale to the Ellison family, Versant didn’t change hands to a new buyer. It was handed to the same shareholders who already owned Comcast. On the CNN side, Anderson Cooper’s net worth shows how much a long run as a cable news anchor can be worth personally.
My take: MS NOW’s owner on paper is a widely held public company, but Roberts’ 33⅓% means Comcast’s longtime boss still has a real say over the network’s corporate future, including any future sale of Versant or its parts.
FAQ
Does Comcast still own MS NOW?
No. Comcast distributed Versant shares to its own shareholders on January 2, 2026, and Versant now trades independently. Many Comcast investors also hold Versant, and Brian Roberts holds voting stock in both companies, but Comcast itself is no longer MS NOW’s parent.
Is MS NOW the same channel as MSNBC?
Yes. It’s the same channel, channel position and lineup of shows, renamed on November 15, 2025. The difference is behind the scenes: it no longer uses NBC News correspondents and has its own newsgathering staff, because NBC News stayed with Comcast after the split.
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