Exclusive: After being cut off by founding funders the Wright family, Sean Plunket has taken full control of his anti-woke media brand The Platform. Duncan Greive analyses the changes.
Wayne Wright Jr, previously the majority shareholder of the digital audio brand The Platform, has sold his entire stake in the business to its founder and breakfast host, Sean Plunket. The company was launched in early 2022, a year after Plunket was removed from the talkback station MagicTalk, following a successful BSA complaint that an interview “had the effect of reflecting and amplifying casual racism towards Māori”. Not long after came an advertiser revolt, and Plunket left the station under strained circumstances.
Plunket licked his wounds, located a backer in Wright, and created a media brand devoted to being able to say almost anything and talk to almost anyone. Now he has total control over the venture, as well as total responsibility for its financial viability.
The transaction has been in the works for a while, as the Platform has come under mounting financial pressure. It parted company with popular sports talk host Martin Devlin a year ago, after the Wright family started winding down its funding, and cut it off completely in March of 2025. Devlin had earlier attracted a major corporate sponsor in One NZ – ironically one of the same companies (when known as Vodafone) which had previously left Magic Talk in protest at its content.
This reveals a meaningful change in the commercial environment for The Platform. “Those first few months we couldn’t give away our advertising,” Wright recalled to Plunket on the station’s third birthday earlier this year. “Everyone was afraid of so-called cancel culture.” Not any more. Along with One NZ, The Platform’s YouTube clips have Spark ads running as mid-rolls. It shows the more permissive media environment we operate in now, a move away from a period when blue chip advertisers attempted to distance themselves from content considered objectionable.
The station is part of a clutch of new digital audio startups that have been built around characters coming out the other side of mainstream broadcasting, including a revived Sports Cafe, the Dom Harvey Show and Reality Check Radio. All have created significant new enterprises from scratch, despite employing some hosts who exited mainstream organisations under various shapes of cloud.
A new, unmediated media
Their success shows that mainstream and regulated media has to obey a set of rules around content which are quite different to those which governed radio in previous eras – and different again from the more libertarian era of social media we live through now. MagicTalk was overseen by the BSA; The Platform answers to no regulator. The combination of wide social distribution through TikTok and Instagram and massive platforms like YouTube and Spotify has proven the audience for shock jocks and unbridled talkback never went away – it just moved.
Video, which generates huge engagement and wide distribution, is a major part of this movement – both short clips on social media and longer forms on streaming platforms. These new startups can generate engagement that dwarfs more buttoned down content from larger outlets.
The Platform exists within this loose group, but also connects more directly to mainstream politics and culture. It has hosted Chrises Luxon and Hipkins, former All Black coaches Ian Foster and Steve Hansen, along with internationally infamous figures like Candace Owens and Posie Parker. It has persistently positioned itself as the only honest and uncompromised media outlet in New Zealand, and invites a wide variety of guests, though gives them quite different hearings.
It’s a persistent troll – weather is called “climate change”, brought to you by Kiwi Fertiliser – but not completely incorrigible, as they pronounce te reo place names correctly within. Plunket is still brilliant at times. Just this morning he opened with an arch critique of Luxon’s announcement of Ikea’s opening day, which he framed as a distraction from the Amazon data centre debacle. “That’s not investing in New Zealand,” he said of Ikea’s debut, “it’s opening a shop.” His interview with Ray Chung was a masterclass, as Joel MacManus noted at the time.
Sean Plunket during his interview with Ray Chung. Photo: The Platform.
The Platform has also, inevitably and intentionally, attracted its share of controversy, much of it of Plunket’s own making and fairly despicable. In 2023 he baselessly claimed that Stuff was underwritten by the Ngai Tāhu iwi. In 2024 he referred to endangered Māui dolphins as “the Down syndrome kids of marine mammals. They’re cross-bred and they deserve to die.” He called for a “pogrom” of appointees from the previous government, in an interview with David Seymour. It’s not just on air. Last year he acknowledged “appalling” behaviour in an employment tribunal hearing involving former Platform staffer Ani O’Brien. Then there was that tweet about Gaza, about which more later.
If Plunket has a favourite drum to bang, it’s critiquing his former employers. He was a mainstream media lifer, and some consider him among the best hosts Morning Report ever had – but his view has markedly soured in recent years. Now media criticism is a major part of his beat. In one of the Platform’s most-viewed clips, he talks about “watching the bribe in action” on TVNZ’s Breakfast, while another popular clip is entitled “Sean Plunket explains to Stuff how journalism works”. Just this morning, he was meant to interview Stacey Morrison, at her request, as part of a forthcoming Te Māngai Pāho-funded show for TVNZ, entitled I’m Not Racist, But…
He had been hyping it, and was furious when it was cancelled less than 24 hours out, with the production citing it having not gained the necessary permission from TVNZ. The state broadcaster told The Spinoff in a statement that “we’re keen for Stacey to promote the show, we just want her to do that when she can tell people how and when they can watch. Our view is that any interviews have been delayed rather than cancelled. We’ll support the media she wants to engage in when it can help viewership.”
Plunket’s big opportunity to talk with a beloved household name about such an inflammatory subject (“I don’t know why they’d want to talk to us about that”, he said, implausibly) had been dashed, but it was all just more content. He ridiculed TVNZ to open his show this morning, and decided to pointedly replace Morrison with a return visit for Julian Batchelor, the Christian evangelist who leads the Stop Co-governance movement.
A new era, with a new kind of media backer
Wright Jr funded The Platform due to his dissatisfaction with mainstream broadcasting in the aftermath of the pandemic, and its paranoid thesis is made clear in the statement establishing a change of ownership. “Established during dark times in New Zealand journalism where the State exchanged control of public narrative for cash and public confidence in media integrity was at all-time lows, the Wright Family funded The Platform from initial startup to a self-sustaining media company to confirm the viability of an unbiased non taxpayer funded new media enterprise in New Zealand.”
This has not been uncomplicated for the Wright family. Wright Jr boasted in an earlier interview with The Spinoff that “they can’t cancel me. When people come and rattle their sabres at us, we can say, ‘well, tomorrow is another day. Good luck with that. And by the way, you could buy one of our things over here. Stay in a hotel we own’.” Yet that has not been entirely true.
As Webworm reported, Plunket recently wrote on X, during a period when famine in Palestine was widely covered, “I’m really concerned about the mass outbreak of anorexia in Gaza”. Wright says that “folks turned to the Wright family for comment. But the Wright family are no longer owners of the Platform.”
Wayne Wright Jr (Photo: Supplied; Design: Tina Tiller)
That was because Wright had bought out the family foundation’s interests in March, transferring them to NGEN Trustee Ltd, a vehicle controlled solely by Wright Jr. The terms of the sale have not been disclosed, but given the millions put in, it’s very likely the Wrights made a substantial financial loss on their investment in the Platform.
Profit was hardly the point, and there seem to be no hard feelings. Wright told The Spinoff that “Sean and I have been very close over the past four years. We started this thing from scratch. I’ve shared a lot of my personal life with him, he’s shared a lot with me. I’d like to think that over the past four years we’ve become friends as well as business partners.” Plunket echoes this sentiment.
This transaction is the end of their business affair. It allows Plunket to assume total control of the enterprise he started, and has made in his image: mischievous, sometimes obnoxious, and always keen to pick a fight.
This morning’s Morrison story will pass. Will The Platform? It was financed into being by Wright, but now rests solely on Plunket’s shoulders. Neither Plunket nor Wright would disclose the terms, though Plunket did say he found the funds “down the back of the sofa”, and is adamant that there is no new backer. He readily admits that he was not a businessperson prior to starting the station, and that recent months have seen it dipping in and out of breakeven. It relies on a mix of audience revenue, revenue share from YouTube and commercial partnerships to pay its expenses.
While before it could call on one of New Zealand’s most vast family fortunes for backup, now it’s a much more precarious proposition. Ultimately, from this day forward, The Platform is Plunket’s alone.