OpenAI just bought a talk show. Not a research lab, not a chip company — a three-hour daily livestream. Price tag: “low hundreds of millions.”
What Is TBPN
TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) is a daily live show hosted by John Coogan (Soylent co-founder, ex-Founders Fund EIR) and Jordi Hays (sold his fintech startup to Rho Technologies). Three hours, five days a week on YouTube and X.
The New York Times called it “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession.” The reality: ~70K viewers per episode, under 60K YouTube subscribers. Not exactly CNN. But their core audience — roughly 200K founders, VCs, and tech execs — is the exact crowd that shapes AI policy conversations. Revenue on track for $30M this year.
An Influence Play, Not a Media Play
TBPN reports to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief political operative. Not the product team. Not content. The politics team. Lehane coined “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the Clinton White House and ran crypto’s Fairshake super PAC before joining OpenAI.
The company promises editorial independence. But TBPN’s ad business is winding down under OpenAI ownership — meaning their only paycheck now comes from the company they cover daily. The Information’s Martin Peers was blunt: editorial independence is “irrelevant.” NYT’s Mike Isaac called the whole thing “a marketing expense.”
How This Stacks Up
Tech companies buying media isn’t new. Amazon got The Washington Post for $250M. Benioff got Time. But those were personal purchases by billionaires — not corporate acquisitions by a pre-IPO company burning through investor cash.
OpenAI is valued at $300B and still raising tens of billions. Spending hundreds of millions on a livestream with 70K viewers hits different. CNBC called their M&A strategy “increasingly puzzling.” Between TBPN, the Windsurf acquisition, and the Jony Ive hardware bet, OpenAI looks less like a research lab and more like a conglomerate.
The acquisition makes one thing clear: Sam Altman wants a direct channel to the people who decide whether AI regulation happens — or doesn’t. At that price, 70K daily viewers of founders and VCs might actually be cheap.
You Might Also Like
- Openai Just Acquired Promptfoo the 86m ai Security Startup Used by 25 of Fortune 500
- Gpt oss 120b Openai Finally Goes Open Source and its Worth the Wait
- Openai Symphony Finally a Framework That Lets you Stop Babysitting Your Coding Agents
- Chatgpt Interactive Visuals Just Dropped Openai Wants 140 Million Weekly Learners to Ditch Static Explanations
- 13b Into Openai yet Microsoft Copilot Cowork Runs on Anthropic Claude
Top AI Product 
Leave a comment