Dave Portnoy has revealed Grace O’Malley’s salary when she was working at Barstool Network
After a popular podcast host called her former salary “decent” her ex-boss has gone viral for revealing exactly how much money she was making.
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The former boss of a well-known US podcaster has revealed her exact salary after she claimed her ex co-host was earning a “sh*t tonne more” than her.
Grace O’Malley rose to prominence as the co-host of the successful PlanBri Uncut podcast on the popular Barstool Network, the network behind the original Call Her Daddy.
She landed the gig partly because she was childhood best friends with internet personality Brianna LaPaglia, also known as Brianna Chickenfry online.
Ms LaPaglia was already a successful influencer and currently has over 1.2 million followers on Instagram, compared to Ms O’Malley’s 300,000 followers.
The two co-hosted the podcast together from 2022 to 2024, and then in December 2024, both announced that Ms O’Malley would be leaving the show.
Recently, Ms O’Malley appeared on the popular podcast This Past Weekend, hosted by comedian Theo Von, and spoke about her salary.
“I had a good salary and that was kind of it,” she said.
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She said the salary was “decent” but “nothing close” to the $500,000 salary that Von guessed she would have been earning.
The 26-year-old also said that her salary was far less than what Ms LaPaglia was making for hosting the same show.
“My buddy was making a little bit more. A whole sh*t tonne more,” she said.
Ms O’Malley added that, when the podcast went on tour, she also didn’t earn extra for that and never “made any money” from it.
“I had an interesting contract. But I loved them so much,” she said.
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Now, the podcaster’s former boss, businessman and online personality Dave Portnoy, has jumped online and clarified how much she was making, and said it “bothers” him when people act like they aren’t getting paid fairly. .
The podcast boss said her base salary was $US175,000, which works out to be over $A280,000, but pointed out that there was ample opportunity to make more.
“On top of that, she got 70 per cent of anything that we were able to sell on her personal socials, so if we had ads and were like, ‘Hey, Grace, do this on your Instagram,’ she would get 70 per cent of that,” he said.
“So she got another $75,000 in 2024 that way. Total salary for last year was a quarter million. $250,000 to Grace. I think that is pretty fair. Pretty good.”
The Barstool Sports founder claimed the only reason Ms O’Malley was paid less was because Ms LaPaglia was a “much bigger” name with triple the followers.
Mr Portnoy’s reveal ignited a big debate online.
Someone said Ms O’Malley’s salary was “insane” another claimed “saying it is a decent salary is so disconnected from reality”, while someone else thought it was “low” considering the success of the podcast.
One person said that salary could change “someone’s life” and someone else said it was “more than” they thought Ms O’Malley would be getting paid and one fan told Portnoy to “leave her alone”.
“She made it seem like she was making $75,000 or something. Not that $75,000 is a bad salary but nowhere near $175,000,” another wrote.
Another pointed out that, as a nurse, she wasn’t even making $100,000, which put Ms O’Malley’s salary into perspective and another shared the podcaster was making more than she and her husband “combined”, despite them both having good jobs.
Others questioned Mr Portnoy’s decision to share his former employee’s salary online.
“Barstool needs an HR company STAT,” one said.
Ms O’Malley’s departure from the podcast in December came at a somewhat turbulent time; Ms LaPaglia was going through a very public break-up with country music star Zach Bryan.
She was going viral online for originally posting videos of herself crying online, claiming she was “blindsided” by the break-up, then later claiming he cheated on her.
Eventually she revealed that she’d been offered “a lot of money” to not talk about the details of their relationship, which she turned down and has since claimed he was “emotionally” abusive in their year-long romance.
During this time, the two podcasters, who are mates in real life, were noticeably not seen together on social media.
Ms LaPaglia later went on her other podcast, which she hosts on the Barstool Network alongside Mr Portnoy, where she claimed Ms O’Malley was “never there” for her during her toxic relationship with Bryan because she didn’t like him.
“You can hate him and still be there for me and she never was,” she said.
Ms LaPaglia also argued that she brought Ms O’Malley along for everything” in her life and “gave her everything” but she wasn’t there when she needed her.
The creator claimed that she ultimately couldn’t do the podcast with her anymore because she didn’t want to be “pretending to be friends”.
Then Ms O’Malley released her own statement on Instagram, saying it wasn’t a “mutual decision” for her to leave the podcast, but she thinks it could be the “right one” in the long run.
She added that she was proud of the podcast and “outright heartbroken” that the chapter had closed.
Despite the fact that the pair don’t seem to be close at the moment, Ms O’Malley did tell Von that, while their friendship was going through a “rough patch”, she believed they would figure it out.
“I still love her,” she said.
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Originally published as Dave Portnoy has revealed Grace O’Malley’s salary when she was working at Barstool Network
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