A lot of people laughed when Glenn Beck left Fox News (or was pushed from Fox News, depending on who you ask) to start his own media empire. Glenn Beck is laughing now. Michael J. Mooney wrote a profile of Beck for the November issue of D Magazine, and it's kind of a victory lap for Beck.

Mooney informs us that Beck's website probably has somewhere around 300,000 subscribers who pay around a hundred bucks a year for digital access to Beck. Beck's Huffington Post rip-off The Blaze is more read than Gawker. He owns "a movie studio, a clothing company, and his own [publishing] imprint." Mooney continues, "All told, he has about 300 employees, and tallying his various endeavors, Forbes put his 2013 income at $90 million—more than Oprah." The article is full of all sorts of humanizing details about Beck—he loves Orson Welles and Walt Disney; his mother drowned in Puget Sound, an apparent suicide—but it's mostly an excuse for Beck to flaunt his success in the world's face.

Except your definition of "success" may vary. Sure, Beck is financially well-off; he'll never want for another creature comfort for as long as he lives. But I'm willing to bet that his influence will never again reach those heady days back at the beginning of the Obama administration, back when he had a regular show on Fox News and the media freaked out over everything he ever said. Sure, he's got a third of a million die-hard fans who put money in his pocket all year long. And sure he's behind a website that gets passed around the internet like one of those shitty e-mails about how Obama is really a demon from the fourth pit of hell. And maybe in the future one of his media properties—a book or a movie, say—will achieve mass-media popularity.

But nothing Beck says matters now the way it did back in the early days of his national fame. His eerie influence over America is gone, and he'll never have that kind of influence again. Not even the money he's pulling in—a drop in the bucket, compared to, say, the Waltons and the Koches—will allow him to win back the audience that he's lost. Surely an Orson Welles fan will understand that you can never buy Rosebud back—once that moment is gone, it's gone forever. Glenn Beck's laughter sounds more than a little bit hollow to me.