AP Photo/Paul Sancya

Jeff Zucker told an audience on Tuesday that the investment company where he now serves as CEO would consider buying CNN if it had the chance.

Zucker stressed that the network was “not for sale” and that buying it was “not something we’re actively thinking about,” but conceded that he would be interested in purchasing the “fantastic asset” if he thought it within the realm of possibility.

“Some day if it were available, like any other great asset, we would look at it,” said the polarizing ex-president of CNN at the Yahoo Finance Invest Conference. “That’s not to say yes or no, it’s just to say it’s a great asset and if the time came, we would look at it.”

Zucker became the president of CNN Worldwide in 2013 and served in that capacity until 2022, when he resigned after it was revealed that he was engaged in an affair with a subordinate. He has been criticized for both his previously friendly personal relationship with Donald Trump, to whom he offered debate advice in 2016 and floated the possibility of a CNN show and the relentless — and almost exclusively negative — coverage of Trump on CNN during his time in office.

Among Zucker’s critics was his immediate successor, Chris Licht, who laid into Zucker over his nonstop coverage of Trump. “We let every little thing that he did consume everything, and so you ended up talking about him for eight hours a day,” Licht said of the Zucker-era CNN. “We are not going to be a 24/7 Trump news network.”

Licht was nevertheless run out of CNN after a little over a year.

Zucker returned fire in June as Licht’s regime went up in flames, directing a a spokeswoman for him to tell the New York Times that it was “wholly unsurprising that Jeff Zucker, the architect of CNN’s unprecedented success, would have deep misgivings about the direction the network has taken since he left.”

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]