Howard Stern has not been fired from SiriusXM and remains in the midst of negotiations over a new contract there.
Amid swirling rumors about his retirement or not being renewed at the satellite radio company, Stern cleared the air on Monday and said that he and his team have been talking about a possible new contract at SiriusXM and what that could look like.
“SiriusXM and my team have been talking about how we go forward in the future, they’ve approached me. They’ve sat down with me like they normally do and they’re fantastic,” Stern said. “We’ve been talking.”
The rumors have brought out several other suitors for his show, he added, however, he said he is “very happy at Sirius.”
He then ran down the headlines, including that he was leaving due to animosity over the hiring of podcaster Alex Cooper. Instead, he said he supported her hiring at SiriusXM, since he owns stock in the company and wants to bring in subscribers.
“I don’t know Alex Cooper,” Stern said. “And if she is young and bubbly, God bless her because I’m the opposite.”
In light of rumors saying that he had been fired, and that it had been because he was “too woke,” Stern said there was “zero truth” to that. He then read out headlines that spoke to his jealousy about Andy Cohen being promoted at SiriusXM more than him.
“None of this is going on. None of it is true. Zero truth,” Stern said.
“What pisses me off is now I can’t leave,” Stern added. “I’ve been thinking about retiring, now I can’t.”
Rumors circulated this summer about SiriusXM not wanting to renew Stern’s contract, amid his high price tag and his less frequent broadcasting schedule. Stern, 71, has also been long-rumored to be retiring after his decades-long career as a talk show host. He had promised to “reveal all” Sept. 2, but delayed his return until Sept. 8.
Stern’s current five-year deal is up at the end of 2025 and was estimated to be worth $100 million a year. SiriusXM still has the rights to Stern’s back catalog through 2027.
Each time Stern’s contract has come up for renewal, the brash talk show host has helped stoke the rumor mill by talking about the negotiations and even teasing his possible departure.
To that end, Stern’s show started out Monday with the prank of having Cohen take over the airwaves and imply that Stern was fired and that it was now his channel.
“This is, I know, not the voice that you expected to hear. This is not the voice that you probably wanted to hear, but it is I, Andy Cohen, and this is our first day broadcasting on Channel 100,” Cohen said, joking that it was now Andy 100. “I know that you’re expecting a big announcement from Howard, and this is not how things were meant to go.”
Stern eventually got on the mic after a musical intro that included “This could be the end of the Stern show.” He added that he missed last week because he had been sick after attending Metallica’s show at the Stephen Talkhouse in the Hamptons and did not have a voice. He continues to have a cold, which he noted may affect his broadcasting schedule this week. It also led to many people reaching out asking if he’d been fired.
“If I get fired, don’t write me,” Stern said.
Since joining SiriusXM in 2006, Stern’s show has been a staple of the radio giant’s programming slate and been seen as a draw for subscribers (though the company has not quantified the exact size of his listenership). In 2020, Credit Suisse analyst Brian Russ estimated that 15 percent of Stern listeners could cancel their SiriusXM subscriptions if he left the company, which at the time meant “a potential subscriber loss of 2.7 million.”
A few listeners called in Monday — one of whom was crying – saying that they had canceled their subscriptions after the Cohen prank, and then reinstated them. Shares of SiriusXM briefly plummeted in-pre-market trading following Cohen’s statements.
This time, SiriusXM is in the midst of belt-tightening, with the company targeting $200 million of annualized savings in 2025 and undergoing layoffs as part of that. The company has recently pointed to its better management of subscriber churn, but has seen its subscriber numbers slowly decline from around 34 million in 2020 to 33 million in the second quarter of 2025. However, SiriusXM executives had expressed a desire to keep him on the air as recently as last week, while noting the deal also has to “make sense.”
