OpenAI Acquires TBPN | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI Acquires TBPN

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244 pointssurprisetalk192 comments

I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist. And TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom so they can continue to operate. I bet they even had a convo such as "we'll never tell you what to say," and both sides genuinely believed it.

But this never ends well. Even if there's never a conversation about it, directly, the implication is there.

I don't care about TBPN, specifically. I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently. (And I say this as someone who pays for some media, but not nearly enough. I don't have $10/mo for every outlet that deserves it.)

EDIT: sama basically said what I said he would: https://x.com/sama/status/2039773740586918137

say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism

(and the fact that they proudly wore it on their sleeve and shone a lamp on it is complete and absolute genius)

In a way it also looks like a16z buying their own marketing blog/news unit. Echo chamber. I happen to like listening to TBPN for discovery purposes.

It doesn’t work for that either. That’s the point. It’s akin to looking at a Texan middle grade schoolbook and then concluding everything significant was invented in America.

Sorry - what doesn't work? Discovery?

I think it's possible to listen and discover things (e.g. companies I don't know) without further succumbing to opinions or other comments about those companies.

Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?

The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?

I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?

I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.

This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...

the damage is already done.

Damage is done constantly in human existence, all around us. This is no different. Failure is when you stop trying. If you’re tired, rest, don’t quit.

The CPB, the legal entity that the government actually funded (and which in turn supplied some of the funding for PBS/NPR and its stations) had its funding rescinded by Congress (under HR4 last year), and has since shuttered.

It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.

Reincorporate? You can just do things. Direct a human to take the required meatspace actions as the judiciary to recreate whatever legal entity previously existed, open a bank account, fund it, and start distributing funds.

If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.

In this case, you cannot simply force Congress to appropriate money to a reincorporated CPB -- unless you were to get a second ruling from a judge that the rescission was unconstitutional.

The Trump EO was deemed unconstitutional because he specifically called out that it didn't like the "left-wing propaganda" (his words) in PBS/NPR programming. Congress's rescission is ostensibly for budgetary reasons -- even if we all know in our heart that they were following Trump's orders.

What we can do is elect a Congress that will revive the CPB. Here's hoping.

That's true, and in the UK we've just removed jury duty trials for some crimes at the snap of a finger.

I know it is hard to see the bias when you are in the bubble along with them.

Great, show me something they consistently misrepresent.

I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.

PBS brings on Brooks Capehart to discuss politics. Having two partisan players from opposite sides of spectrum is a good way to get some balance. The fact that they agree so often on the fundamentals tells me the US is cooked.

Ahem, their reporting on nuclear power was often non-scientific and just plain wrong. In fact anything having to do with the environment was generally pretty poor from a factual and scientific basis. Their reporting on politics was consistently rated as one of the most extreme in the US media.

I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.

> The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?

Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.

> Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?

This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.

There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.

See more details on: https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english

Maybe I'm biased as an American, but if this were to be proposed here, who decides which outlets are blessed with the government money and the corresponding air of legitimacy of being an official public broadcaster?

> There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.

Well yes, but calling them politically independent is a bit of a stretch. A 2024 study found 52% of board members (Rundfunkrat) have a party membership (~2% of the general population is part of a party). [0]

To take one example you mention, the ZDF-Fernsehrat is dominated by party members (33/60).Notably only by the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the SocDems (SPD), with 2 green members and 1 member of the SSW. Neither the left party, nor the far right AfD have any representation, despite accounting for roughly 30% of the national vote. Religious communities have signifigantly more representation (9), than the scientific community (0). [1]

Public media was always a tool to help create and maintain a societal overton window of shared truth and identity, and as such very helpful in keeping Germany united and democratic. There was however also always clearly immoral and untrue directions taken for ideological reasons or political convenience, for example the support of Apartheid South Africa til its fall, and the recent biased coverage of Israel. Many other topics as well, like immigration, covid and the war in Russia, are presented in a way that does not align with significant amounts of the german population: We are currently witnessing this overton window breaking apart completely, in other words, German public media has failed in its primary purpose.

[0] https://www.medienpolitik.net/aktuelle-themen/die-politik-is...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDF-Fernsehrat

I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.

There was a 2020 US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, who proposed something like this.[1]

1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/andrew-yang-the-most-meme-...

This is partially the case in Italy, though it changed over the years.

The assignment of funds is based on refunding prints/sales, so money goes to help newspapers that do print "something" of interest to the public.

The problem is that people don't want "independent" journalism, they want "my ideas" journalism.

Which.. still good somehow? Italy had plenty of newspapers which were the literal extension of political parties and a few independent ones in the past and still does.

But these days, they are all dying anyway.

>I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist

>TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom

Company literally sold to someone else, we now conclude they believe to achieve economic freedom.

>Company genuinely believing anything.

Yep, it is 2026 and words mean nothing in, we better ooga booga or something

> "we'll never tell you what to say,"

TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.

Fairly good encapsulation of chomskey's manufactured consent. TBPN was chosen precisely because they'll never have to tell them what to say.

Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.

I am sure that what you mentioned was said, but it is surprisingly difficult to have a conversation in a room full of these

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eWdX4qBUyQ3D

There's no way a popular show like that needs money, they were probably millionaires already with sponsorships. Why are we pretending these people are poor or need help to survive?

> I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently.

I agree, but this is 100% not the right model. Altman is not the right person to be in control of a media organisation. He shows little willing to understand anything of how the world works currently, let alone something out of his wheel house.

i am gonna miss the ad reads

the segways to the ad reads are always one of their funniest bits

Or, they know exactly what they wield when they take over.

Right, it's simple mathematics. It costs X energy units to raise a human to adulthood, and Y energy units to train a frontier language model. What's so hard about this?

You can unfortunately see this across the media spectrum. There seem to be basically two paths:

1. Cozy up to the big money in your industry, have them on for PR interviews with easy questions, and eventually get sponsored / acquired by them. I hesitate to even call this journalism, it’s more just sponsored entertainment.

2. Build a personal brand as someone known for being particularly critical / investigative / etc. This will undoubtedly make you far less money, and you’ll probably end up shilling ads for gold coins in between asking for Patreon supporters.

I’ve always wondered if a government-funded (in a way that cannot be manipulated) organization whose sole purpose is to criticize everyone would ever work. It might even need to be run anonymously.

> I bet OpenAI genuinely believes

What does this even mean? Who is being "genuine"? This is far to naive a take for a company thats burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, and constantly striving to set the tone of AI and their own supremacy.

Its conceding, or sidestepping, a common debate point yo focus on the crux or the issue.

To be honest, until a month ago, I hadn't even heard of TBPN or seen any of their content. But, seemingly, out of nowhere, they managed to get all the leaders in AI to appear in their programming.

The core of the information they present isn't much different than what you'd hear on Dwarkesh or other industry podcasts, the presentation is some weird mix of ESPN and Mad Money that I personally don't get, but maybe makes sense to a US audience.

I don't see why that is interesting to OpenAI, but maybe I'm missing something.

I would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?

Funny, this gave me strong manosphere vibes as well, despite ostensibly not being about using misogyny to extract wealth from incels.

American here.

I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.

Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.

The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.

tl;dr = it's for gamblers

Just based on the number of very prominent guests they get to do interviews, they clearly have a lot of viewers in influential tech/vc circles, even if their total audience size isn’t huge.

That's true, but a lot of these people are also competitors. I can't imagine it'll be attractive going to the OpenAI media channel to talk about Gemini or Grok.

Super confusing... seems like some sort of in with the VCs that can pull this program's guests was enough to create a new podcast that is now seen as influential. My best is, this was a side liquidity event for the openAI VCs that had somehow invested into the podcast, looking to get some money out of openAI stake.

I like this theory for no other reason than it seems plausible lol

OpenAI is the most well-capitalized startup in history, and simultaneously in the center of the most hated cycle in tech (AI) since the mechanized loom.

Isn't the arbitrage these guys ran using their VC connections pretty obvious? TBPN is one of the few professionalized-with-a-team media outlets that offers a positive view of AI vs. the doomer stance of all other media (by a factor of like 100 to 1).

Total audience size is irrelevant if a good percentage of the people in that audience are tech influencers/billionaires, regardless of how niche and mainstream-irrelevant outside of X that TBPN is.

Media properties, like sports teams, are different than other businesses. To the people who own them, influence can be far more important than cashflows. Hence why a surprisingly large percentage of 19th century newspapers in many countries are still under the control of the families who founded them (just look at the NY Times).

While acquiring a youtube channel with 50K subs for hundreds of millions is definitely dotcom bubble-esque nonsense and will be viewed as such looking back, it makes total sense to me why its happening.

Dwarkesh gets far more technical and in the weeds than TPBN. It’s very different. I can’t listen to TPBN though it seems fun but I’ll relisten to Dwarkesh episodes more than once.

For anyone who really cares about AI in depth, Dwarkesh and the sxyz podcasts are the OG.

I don’t know. I find him pretty hard to listen to. He has admitted that his show prep is AI produced, and I think the gaps in his understanding come across in conversation. I also find his child-like irreverence and familiar tone with his guests to be very distasteful. He also can’t drink a pint of Guinness and you just can’t trust people like that.

His elbows are too pointy?

Did you listen to his interview with Amodei? The guy goes on about, “well don’t you know about such and such” or “yeah but an AI can’t learn like an intern…” like he’s trying to argue with him. Look, this is coming from a guy who hasn’t really done anything with his life other than be friends with people in San Francisco, talking to the head of a company that’s changing the way an entire industry operates. I think Dwarkesh just needs to shut up and listen. The total lack of respect puts me off.

have not heard of sxyz podcasts? searching yt did not gave anything meaningful

Likely meant 'swyx', https://www.latent.space/podcast

(came from f5 bot) haha yeah if any ai companies are looking i’ll talk for $200m!!!

I have known about TBPN since early summer last year. They are widely known about in Cali startup culture at least.

This is the IT version of "I was listening to them before they got big!". Just as nerdy.

Conspiracy theory: they recorded a guest with egregious dirt on OpenAI and this money is to bury it. I have no proof and it's implausible but it makes more sense than the stated reasons.

Me neither. Just seems like a money grab (tbpn founders getting a massive rip) and allows OpenAI to push corporate propaganda.

Distribution is the moat. This is distribution, I guess.

OpenAI is to TBPN what Fox is to Republicans. A propaganda puppet.

TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.

I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.

The winner of this AI cycle will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from possibly the most influential people of the near future.

They are probably preparing for an IPO

They are busy funding age verification lobbying already

https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/01/openai-ai-kids-safety-coal...

OpenClaw was not acquired. The creator of it was hired by OpenAI, but OpenClaw is still independent.

Had to double check this wasn’t a late April Fools joke. Each weird acquisition or product launch feels like an implicit admission that anything like “AGI” is never coming.

but Jensen said we already achieved it!

It was never coming. Slopchain markov generators are completely unrelated to AGI. They don’t think, they aren’t capable of ever thinking.

You need something completely different, which they haven’t figured out.

I don't understand this at all. 58.2K youtube subs and under 3k views on most videos. This seems like they have barely just started?

They’re more active on Twitter/X,

idk what it is about them that every "tech bro" type guy around me follows them, but I never followed them myself, so I was surprised to know they only have 300k on Twitter.

They're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.

Not sure either, it seems like OpenAI has more money than they can spend and just looks for outsized bets.

Never heard of it.

TBPN was also reportedly on track to do $30M in sponsorship revenue this year, up from $5M last year. Audience size is modest but targeted & high value per viewer (mostly decision makers in tech).

seems about right. They came across as the yes men of podcasts for tech people that want to pretend they are doing no wrong, maybe i just chose a really rough 10 minute section of a random podcast though, but not one moment did they not come across in that manner.

Their primary outlet is Twitter, not YouTube.

It’ll be some sort of investor fraud. Like it’s Sam’s friend who will give him most of the billion back or whatever.

Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?

oh wow you were not kidding

It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.

yup. open the page, fans start revving up.

I visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed

I couldn’t put this into words so thank you for that

I've read this word 50 times in this thread so far and still don't know what it is an acronym for...

Wikipedia says it means "Technology Business Programming Network"

"airs weekdays from 11–2pm PT"

This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!

Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?

Yes but also think of it as 'generates content from 11-2pm PT, with each hour giving 12+ small clips that have the chance to be shared, go viral, etc.'

this is the correct answer. the stream is just the production process, not the full product.

It's CNBC for Silicon Valley - a combination of good background noise, a broad survey of what people are talking about around the valley, and occasionally really great interviews.

They get a lot of guests to do interviews that they wouldn't do elsewhere, in part because they are unabashedly and unapologetically cheerleaders - pro-tech, pro-VC, pro-startup, pro-Big-Tech, etc. They don't grill you like an old-school journalist would about whatever the latest political controversy is, they ring a giant gong when their guest brings up a cool traction or fundraising number.

I would never use it as my only source of news for what's going on in tech, but with a lot of other tech journalism covering the downsides or problems with the industry, there is definitely a niche for them.

Like most streaming, it's what is referred to as "second monitor content". You have it on in the background.

Some ideas.

1- That's roughly around lunch break, including central time and to a lesser extent ET. 2- Lots of people put podcasts in the background, while coding, running, cooking, eating. Especially with airpod-like products. 3- Lots of people watch the clips/highlights and go to the source if needed. It's more a format where the unedited version is posted because technology allows it, which ends up as more transparent than just publishing the edit. In journalism a lot can go on in an edit.

I don't think anyone is rawdogging the 3 hours without any multitasking

Don't overlook the penultimate paragraph:

"I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me. I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show [...]."

So there's a large acquihire component here. Maybe the dominant component.

> acquihire

What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.

I've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??

Essentially yes. It only has traction on X, but in the AI world that is all that is necessary. (its engagement metrics are poor for its size on all other platforms)

Sort of. There's a lot of activity now in other places:

- Reddit has a ton of exciting content about local models

- Bluesky has some interesting developers toying with memory and social media bots since it's an open platform (unlike X)

However, most leaders in the AI space all post on X and sam altman + the sv investor class are all hopelessly addicted to it.

I just recently switched away from Bluesky to reluctantly checking back in to X, for the first time since the acquisition. It feels like all the AI information is on X, it's basically necessary.

Bluesky is better than Mastodon for AI, and I'd rather be on a platform where it's more open and I can at least use whatever client I want. I love what Hailey & Cameron are doing on Bluesky and I miss chatting to Penny & Void. But Bluesky felt like being in a rural country town, and X was like a major city. Turns out it isn't just hearing relevant information that's important, but the speed with which you hear it. Half the time Bluesky was just screenshots of X anyway.

I gave up on Bluesky at the point where Anthropic / Claude got its designation from DoW, and no-one on Bluesky even cared. I'm still bitter about that.

what do you even do on X, you basically just subscribe to a bunch of blowhards to get insider sloppy seconds, then occasionally yell into the void and hope someone (anyone) finally responds?

What I found is that the "For You" algorithm on X was better than I thought. Yes, it starts off as terrible, and remains terrible without very careful steering. I'm treating X as read-only and not interacting.

But after liking a few posts by Amanda Askell, Simon Willison, Ethan Mollick, Boris Cherny and others, I was immediately getting far better AI information than I was on Bluesky, from accounts beyond the ones where I'd liked their posts. That isn't necessarily a high bar, but at least it was people actively using AI, people who are positive about the things that can be made with it. I'm more likely to hear about new model releases that I won't hear about elsewhere.

At least on X, I'm going to hear people talking about Claude Mythos, and I'll hear about the Nicholas Carlini talk [1] where Claude Mythos is finding & reporting CVEs in the Linux kernel.

On Bluesky, my time was being spent fighting off anti-AI university professors who were still in the "stochastic parrot" phase. They were genuinely convinced AI models couldn't even write code that compiles, let alone entire working programs that solve problems.

I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone else to use X, and I'd really rather not be using X myself.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg

I've seen it mentioned before but never checked it out. It def has ESPN vibes but I think it's more like a new Techcrunch.

The extremely uninformative website isn't helping much. There's a more info button that provides no info whatsoever.

It really feels like OpenAI simply acquires anything AI adjacent that is trendy or allows financial analysts to argue that we just don’t understand Sam Altman’s 39D chess strategy.

Maybe he's playing a friendly game against Trump of 4-dimentia chess?

How does acquiring a relatively unknown niche podcast align with their mission ?

Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.

Well, they need to ensure AI advances, and that means advancing the podcast that will pretend that popular opinion is absurd and big tech is always right.

Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community.

Methinks this is one of those moments where we will look back and say: Oh Sam facepalm.

> Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community.

Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.

Maybe it's just me but as soon as something like this, that should be independent, is owned by something it reports on, it becomes something you need to automatically trust less.

60K followers on youtube for low hundreds of millions? seems steep

guarantee one of them caught an OpenAI guy murdering a prostitute or something

What is TBPN? It looks like some sort of scam or parody of a podcast when I got to their site.

Even if it’s legit and I’m just old enough to not understand modern aesthetics, why would OpenAI be spending any sort of money on media at all?

This has got to be a joke at this point, and at worse some kind of financial scheme for Altman friends & family. What's next? Will I wake up to an announcement OpenAI is acquiring Joe Rogan's podcast?

I thought this was supposed to be the year of "focus". They just shut down one money pit (Sora) but apparently still have money to buy some random tech podcast most people have never heard of?

At this point I don't feel sorry for them, they deserve everything that's coming for them.

attention is all you need

Next step: OpenAI acquires CNN for a more "open" conversation about AI.

This is genuinely sad to see; people do not have a sense of autonomy and identity, it seems.

What is tbpn, a podcasting company? Why would OpenAI want that? How is this helping them attain profitability or further their ai market capture?

'buy everything to build the castle' thing companies do before they implode.

PR team.

I speculate OpenAI wants to shape the "AI" narrative via Media Capture.

The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast

No they should buy the All-in podcast and make them talk shit about the admin

They are too busy making money

I have made a commitment to reduce my overly long and excessively hedged comments on here, so, if I may: What the heck. Is this a belated April fools joke?

This is not what a company on the precipice of AGI or even one that has faith in LLMs being a consistent growth driver across the industry would realistically do.

Is this a good investment financially? I don't know and seeing as I have never heard of TBPN before this post, I am not the right person to gauge that.

But any investment, be it in building your own Social Networks (Sora 2), a news show or anything else beyond model training is frankly, to me at least, a clear admission that OpenAI does not see nearly as much value in models as they have been selling investors on.

Considering the rest of the economy, that is more terrifying than any "AI will kill us" prediction.

If OpenAI believed even a tenth of what they have tried to sell investors, governments and the public on, they'd not have a penny to invest in anything akin to this, plain and simple.

I think there will be an AI correction and OpenAI will be the center of it. I have no clue what their plan is, they seem to throw everything at the wall an nothing sticks. Gonna take MicroSlop down with them. Anthropic and Google will come out the other end in great shape though.

Picking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows.

On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters.

On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.

Focus always wins out in the end.

I thought they acquire the pirate bay.

Such a ridiculous set of acquisitions from OpenAI and the state of the market in general. A trillion dollar company buying 50k subscriber Youtube shows that happened to ride the hype train, while teams spend decades of their live perfecting something dreaming about a fraction of an exit.

With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?

Theyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.

An AI company owning a major tech podcast?

Wow, what’s next?

Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?

states should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century

Robinhood did exact same thing, it's more for marketing reach and distribution stuff. Wouldn't be surprised in few years they let it go or spin it down, just paying for a funnel/some narrative control

Wait a second...

Shouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?

AI will eat all Media, all of it.

If the vast majority of CEOs in this industry are to be believed, any company that achieves "AGI" will be undefeatable, their model improvements and research findings impossible to catch up to. Why risk that being Anthropic, Moonshot or any other competitor to OpenAI by spending your money on this?

The few months/years before "Everyone dies", wouldn't OpenAI want to be the "Anyone" that "build it" and is in control during that time? Unless, of course, OpenAI does not actually believe in that being a possibility, as suspected when they were working on social media...

This is some insane delusion.

Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.

I admit I'm surprised by the move, from a company that reportedly just talked about how they need to focus more on fewer, more strategic products.

But I also see the potential value. This is an entertaining and highly influential podcast, a lot of top VC's and founders watch it; it definitely punches well above it's audience KPI's in strategic value. I've seen many interviews or op-eds on the platform pretty clearly shape the startup discourse on X.

I also think it should run mostly autonomously, it'll only be as much of a distraction for OpenAI execs as they want it to be.

OpenAI just raised $122 billion (including future commitments), so whatever the purchase price was (we have no diea) is not going to even be a rounding error on their financial resources or their ability to pay their datacenter bills.

Is TBPN really considered "major" (seeing as most of the comments I've seen are how no one's heard of them before) or are you just being sarcastic?

First I'm hearing of them and with this ownership I'll be highly skeptical of any of their content if I do happen to watch.

I have lost faith in sama and openai management.

> Technology Business Programming Network

This sounds like a fake podcast they would make fun of on Silicon Valley

Edit: it gets even better, "Coogan is co-founder of meal replacement company Soylent"

More acquihiring for the AI gods, for they will never be satisfied until all shall bow to them.

OpenAI helps fund Axios, also, BTW.

When does the 24 hour agent news network start? Programming by agents for humans and agents. Sora talking heads scraping articles and generating content. I’d find human to agent or agent to agent live interview segments interesting.

lol public opinion is in the toilet so they buy a propaganda arm. Typical

I hope when we look back at 2026 this is not the "Big Short moment"

https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235

All of the ads are gone from the stream?!

As a viewer I don’t think this is in my interest as I think they will get a lot less prestige guests now. They have interviewed some huge names recently.

Good for the TBPN team! I think their genius wasn't in having the best info, it was that they made tech people feel like celebrities.

Will they maintain the hard right political angle?

What.

I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...

The attention economy, that is the game - there isn't anything else to it now.

Without attention you're nothing.

since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.

This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/35L5nxL7VSmHIuaArgdCx1

They are intentionally making something like Bloomberg TV, with a very specific tech news audience and with some of the playbook of twitch streamers - growing via clipping -- but a look and feel of Cable news shows.

They mention squawk box on CNBC many times, as competition, in the interview and that they have no problem with filling ad inventory for their 3+ hours of programming a day.

I saw the first comment "free media" and thought TBPN is The Pirate Bay Network.

April fools or self-dealing ?

Perplexity preparing to acquire Quartr in response to this in three, two, one

Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.

Why could OpenAI feel the need to control the narrative?

Never even heard of TBPN but congrats!

Why though? Great for the TBPN crew.

> Why though?

It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are after.

> So rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense to bring them in, support what they’re doing, and help them scale—while keeping what makes them special.

OpenAI was losing attention to Anthropic because of Claude Code, so they raised money and are trying to buy it back.

I literally did not know TBPN existed and I am gonna forget about it in the next minute.

This channel is less than 2 years old, <60k subs, most of their videos have low view rates... I don't get it. Is this a joke?

Sama wants to be elon without going public or before going public. Next up, underwater datacenters and more fusion energy slop

TBPN > Prof G Pod > BG2 Pod > All-In Podcast

A real loss.

Genuinely thought this would be an April Fools joke. But this is the kind of tech media we deserve for using paywall bypassers and ad blockers.

Shouldnt the product speak for itself? Why do you need to buy a press team.

I mean litteraly, with all the AI podcasts out there just get it to do it. It was going to take all our jobs anyways or something.

what does tbpn even stand for?

They were called "Tech Bro Podcast Network" but rebranded at some point.

April fool!

TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...

Sounds like OpenAI trying to control another narrative.

Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook

comparing TBPN to the WP is weird

More like Ozy Media, except those guys fumbled the acquisition bag:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-10-05...

open ai acquires an somewhat media established group to push their corporate propaganda. Got it.

Altman just taking another step down his slow transformation into Jeff bezos.

calling it now that OpenAI changes strategy to instead of building actual AI / anything themselves they just raise lots of capital and buy anything promising in/around the AI space.

who?

From the Techmeme summary of the Financial Times (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/4fe4972a-3d24-45be-b9fa-a429c432b...

> Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for "low hundreds of millions of dollars"; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent

wut

thought The

Wtf is TBPN?

silly.

Sam has extraordinary business sense.

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