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.
Philpax•Apr 2, 2026
What.
huslage•Apr 2, 2026
I've never heard of TBPN but it appears to be an AI sports network of some sort??
minimaxir•Apr 2, 2026
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)
phillipcarter•Apr 2, 2026
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.
SyneRyder•Apr 2, 2026
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.
plaguuuuuu•Apr 2, 2026
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?
brentm•Apr 2, 2026
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.
phrotoma•Apr 3, 2026
The extremely uninformative website isn't helping much. There's a more info button that provides no info whatsoever.
asadm•Apr 2, 2026
attention is all you need
faangguyindia•Apr 2, 2026
I thought they acquire the pirate bay.
Topfi•Apr 2, 2026
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.
travelalberta•Apr 2, 2026
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.
Topfi•Apr 2, 2026
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.
df2sdf•Apr 2, 2026
Focus always wins out in the end.
suriya-ganesh•Apr 2, 2026
since tbpn is known for their quite oblique satire. i wonder if this is some long April 1st thing.
chvid•Apr 2, 2026
April fool!
_jab•Apr 2, 2026
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?
df2sdf•Apr 2, 2026
Theyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.
csmiller•Apr 2, 2026
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.
throwatdem12311•Apr 2, 2026
but Jensen said we already achieved it!
MagicMoonlight•Apr 3, 2026
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.
phillipcarter•Apr 2, 2026
Sooo....why the hell is the TBPN website so InfoWars-coded?
rbtprograms•Apr 2, 2026
oh wow you were not kidding
polio•Apr 2, 2026
It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.
duskdozer•Apr 3, 2026
yup. open the page, fans start revving up.
QuadmasterXLII•Apr 2, 2026
I visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed
brap•Apr 3, 2026
I couldn’t put this into words so thank you for that
sureglymop•Apr 3, 2026
I've read this word 50 times in this thread so far and still don't know what it is an acronym for...
gkoberger•Apr 2, 2026
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.)
say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism
swyx•Apr 3, 2026
(and the fact that they proudly wore it on their sleeve and shone a lamp on it is complete and absolute genius)
unfitted2545•Apr 2, 2026
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?
gkoberger•Apr 2, 2026
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.
toomuchtodo•Apr 2, 2026
This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.
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.
valleyer•Apr 3, 2026
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.
toomuchtodo•Apr 3, 2026
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.
valleyer•Apr 3, 2026
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.
unfitted2545•Apr 2, 2026
That's true, and in the UK we've just removed jury duty trials for some crimes at the snap of a finger.
greenchair•Apr 2, 2026
I know it is hard to see the bias when you are in the bubble along with them.
gkoberger•Apr 2, 2026
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.
skeeter2020•Apr 2, 2026
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.
hunterpayne•Apr 3, 2026
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.
tshaddox•Apr 2, 2026
> 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.
okanat•Apr 2, 2026
> 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.
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?
collinmcnulty•Apr 2, 2026
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.
vostrocity•Apr 3, 2026
There was a 2020 US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, who proposed something like this.[1]
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.
heliumtera•Apr 2, 2026
>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
dist-epoch•Apr 2, 2026
> "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.
lobb-deep•Apr 2, 2026
Fairly good encapsulation of chomskey's manufactured consent. TBPN was chosen precisely because they'll never have to tell them what to say.
tootie•Apr 2, 2026
Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.
jrflowers•Apr 2, 2026
I am sure that what you mentioned was said, but it is surprisingly difficult to have a conversation in a room full of these
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?
KaiserPro•Apr 3, 2026
> 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.
keiferski•Apr 3, 2026
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.
sefrost•Apr 2, 2026
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.
i_have_an_idea•Apr 2, 2026
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.
hrldcpr•Apr 2, 2026
I would guess that the whole "manosphere" phenomenon helped cryptocurrencies and Trump, so probably can help OpenAI too?
bargainbin•Apr 3, 2026
Funny, this gave me strong manosphere vibes as well, despite ostensibly not being about using misogyny to extract wealth from incels.
gkoberger•Apr 2, 2026
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
mlinsey•Apr 2, 2026
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.
i_have_an_idea•Apr 2, 2026
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.
clueless•Apr 2, 2026
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.
christoff12•Apr 2, 2026
I like this theory for no other reason than it seems plausible lol
pembrook•Apr 2, 2026
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.
thundergolfer•Apr 2, 2026
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.
nojvek•Apr 3, 2026
For anyone who really cares about AI in depth, Dwarkesh and the sxyz podcasts are the OG.
GorbachevyChase•Apr 3, 2026
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.
dyauspitr•Apr 3, 2026
His elbows are too pointy?
born-jre•Apr 3, 2026
have not heard of sxyz podcasts? searching yt did not gave anything meaningful
(came from f5 bot) haha yeah if any ai companies are looking i’ll talk for $200m!!!
georgeven•Apr 2, 2026
I have known about TBPN since early summer last year. They are widely known about in Cali startup culture at least.
skeeter2020•Apr 3, 2026
This is the IT version of "I was listening to them before they got big!". Just as nerdy.
tootie•Apr 2, 2026
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.
xyst•Apr 3, 2026
Me neither. Just seems like a money grab (tbpn founders getting a massive rip) and allows OpenAI to push corporate propaganda.
archeantus•Apr 3, 2026
Distribution is the moat. This is distribution, I guess.
lovich•Apr 2, 2026
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?
hmokiguess•Apr 2, 2026
Straight from the Bezos Washington Post playbook
misiti3780•Apr 2, 2026
comparing TBPN to the WP is weird
operatingthetan•Apr 2, 2026
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?
SamDc73•Apr 2, 2026
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.
gordonhart•Apr 2, 2026
They're primarily a Twitter phenomenon and get circulated quite widely within the tech sphere there.
aswegs8•Apr 2, 2026
Not sure either, it seems like OpenAI has more money than they can spend and just looks for outsized bets.
tantalor•Apr 2, 2026
Never heard of it.
ohong•Apr 2, 2026
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).
sidrag22•Apr 2, 2026
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.
Aurornis•Apr 2, 2026
Their primary outlet is Twitter, not YouTube.
MagicMoonlight•Apr 3, 2026
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.
ancorevard•Apr 3, 2026
X
mlinsey•Apr 2, 2026
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?
yieldcrv•Apr 2, 2026
states should remove the "purpose" field of incorporation statutes, its too antiquated now and for half a century
bfeynman•Apr 2, 2026
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
angrydev•Apr 2, 2026
Wait a second...
operatingthetan•Apr 2, 2026
Shouldn't OpenAI be focused on becoming profitable and surviving the next 2 years instead of buying podcast toys?
kingleopold•Apr 2, 2026
AI will eat all Media, all of it.
Topfi•Apr 2, 2026
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...
df2sdf•Apr 2, 2026
This is some insane delusion.
Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.
mlinsey•Apr 2, 2026
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.
BoredPositron•Apr 2, 2026
Sam has extraordinary business sense.
brentm•Apr 2, 2026
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.
talideon•Apr 2, 2026
I misread that acronym as TBDN, which made me wonder why they'd bought The Beef and Dairy Network podcast...
screye•Apr 2, 2026
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.
a_victorp•Apr 2, 2026
They are probably preparing for an IPO
delfinom•Apr 3, 2026
They are busy funding age verification lobbying already
OpenClaw was not acquired. The creator of it was hired by OpenAI, but OpenClaw is still independent.
brimal•Apr 2, 2026
Should start a new AI company just hoping to cash in on the gold rush.
simonw•Apr 2, 2026
"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?
mkmk•Apr 2, 2026
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.'
swyx•Apr 3, 2026
this is the correct answer. the stream is just the production process, not the full product.
mlinsey•Apr 2, 2026
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.
internet101010•Apr 3, 2026
Like most streaming, it's what is referred to as "second monitor content". You have it on in the background.
game_the0ry•Apr 2, 2026
I have lost faith in sama and openai management.
adamgordonbell•Apr 2, 2026
This interview is very in-depth look at the TBPN business:
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.
wahnfrieden•Apr 2, 2026
Will they maintain the hard right political angle?
louiereederson•Apr 2, 2026
TBPN seems like the media equivalent of Soylent. Oh wait...
blueblisters•Apr 2, 2026
The only logical step for Anthropic now is to buy the Dwarkesh Patel podcast
johnwheeler•Apr 2, 2026
Sounds like OpenAI trying to control another narrative.
> 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
clueless•Apr 2, 2026
60K followers on youtube for low hundreds of millions? seems steep
plaguuuuuu•Apr 2, 2026
guarantee one of them caught an OpenAI guy murdering a prostitute or something
kklisura•Apr 2, 2026
TBPN > Prof G Pod > BG2 Pod > All-In Podcast
bad_haircut72•Apr 2, 2026
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.
robotresearcher•Apr 2, 2026
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.
tantalor•Apr 2, 2026
> acquihire
What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
tantalor•Apr 2, 2026
> 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"
hokkos•Apr 2, 2026
April fools or self-dealing ?
qwertyuiop_•Apr 2, 2026
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.
sidrag22•Apr 2, 2026
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.
df2sdf•Apr 2, 2026
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.
philipwhiuk•Apr 3, 2026
> Erm people are not stupid, especially the investing community.
Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.
iandanforth•Apr 2, 2026
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.
Atomic_Torrfisk•Apr 2, 2026
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.
rvz•Apr 2, 2026
Perplexity preparing to acquire Quartr in response to this in three, two, one
dana321•Apr 2, 2026
The attention economy, that is the game - there isn't anything else to it now.
Without attention you're nothing.
qwertyuiop_•Apr 2, 2026
I hope when we look back at 2026 this is not the "Big Short moment"
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.
yalogin•Apr 2, 2026
What is tbpn, a podcasting company? Why would OpenAI want that? How is this helping them attain profitability or further their ai market capture?
downrightmike•Apr 2, 2026
'buy everything to build the castle' thing companies do before they implode.
noman-land•Apr 2, 2026
PR team.
throwatdem12311•Apr 2, 2026
lol public opinion is in the toilet so they buy a propaganda arm. Typical
creddit•Apr 2, 2026
A real loss.
Eufrat•Apr 2, 2026
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.
skeeter2020•Apr 3, 2026
Maybe he's playing a friendly game against Trump of 4-dimentia chess?
CompoundEyes•Apr 2, 2026
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.
6DM•Apr 2, 2026
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?
QuadmasterXLII•Apr 2, 2026
what does tbpn even stand for?
georgel•Apr 3, 2026
They were called "Tech Bro Podcast Network" but rebranded at some point.
dwa3592•Apr 2, 2026
I literally did not know TBPN existed and I am gonna forget about it in the next minute.
Marciplan•Apr 3, 2026
silly.
thelastgallon•Apr 3, 2026
I saw the first comment "free media" and thought TBPN is The Pirate Bay Network.
voidfunc•Apr 3, 2026
Never even heard of TBPN but congrats!
xyst•Apr 3, 2026
open ai acquires an somewhat media established group to push their corporate propaganda. Got it.
shrubble•Apr 3, 2026
OpenAI helps fund Axios, also, BTW.
Andrey28•Apr 3, 2026
Love these guys. Discovered them through a Senra tweet back in 2024. Very high signal to noise ratio!
I've built a database of fundraising announcements and guests TBPN has had on. Started as a tracker for myself and made it public now.
TBPN has become the de facto deal announcement venue. Which explains the "why would OpenAI buy this" question. 296 companies announced fundraises on the show, totaling $70.9B across 314 deals. a16z showed up in 20 deals, Sequoia in 13, Founders Fund in 12. Defense & aerospace alone: 35 companies raised $10.3B.
64 Comments
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
You need something completely different, which they haven’t figured out.
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
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?
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...
It's not clear how, even under that recent ruling, that rescission will be undone.
If you need the Treasury to initiate the EFT and they refuse to, send law enforcement to effectuate the funds transfer.
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.
I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.
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.
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.
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
1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/andrew-yang-the-most-meme-...
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.
>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
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eWdX4qBUyQ3D
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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.
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?
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.
Wow, what’s next?
Ecommerce giants owning major newspapers? An aerospace company owning a microblogging platform? Startup accelerators owning tech news aggregators?
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...
Focus on building a great product and you win. All this other stuff is noise.
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.
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.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/01/openai-ai-kids-safety-coal...
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?
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.
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.
> 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
"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.
What else would there be? It's a podcast. They have no assets.
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"
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
Methinks this is one of those moments where we will look back and say: Oh Sam facepalm.
Yes, yes they are. It's not a community. It's a herd.
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.
Without attention you're nothing.
https://youtu.be/MesrrYyuoa4?t=235
I've built a database of fundraising announcements and guests TBPN has had on. Started as a tracker for myself and made it public now.
TBPN has become the de facto deal announcement venue. Which explains the "why would OpenAI buy this" question. 296 companies announced fundraises on the show, totaling $70.9B across 314 deals. a16z showed up in 20 deals, Sequoia in 13, Founders Fund in 12. Defense & aerospace alone: 35 companies raised $10.3B.
The show's reach is absolutely top tier!
Data at https://www.tbpndigest.com/
And why does OpenAI care about funding announcements, which trail actual fundraises by weeks or months?