OpenAI has agreed to acquire TBPN — the Technology Business Programming Network — in what two people briefed on the deal describe as a low-hundreds-of-millions transaction, the company's first acquisition of a media property. TBPN, a daily Silicon Valley talk show that launched in 2024, is on track to book roughly $30 million in revenue this year on a mix of live-read sponsorships and paid subscriptions.
Inside OpenAI, executives frame the purchase as editorial infrastructure. The company is already the largest provider of consumer-facing AI in the world, but its distribution is mediated almost entirely by third parties — Apple, Microsoft, the press. Owning TBPN gives OpenAI a direct channel to the operator class it has historically struggled to win over: founders, VCs, engineering leaders, and the financial media that feeds them.
For TBPN, the deal caps a remarkable 22-month run. Co-hosts Jordi Hays and John Coogan built the show on a thesis that the tech industry had outgrown traditional business television, and that a live, opinionated, multi-hour daily program would find an audience willing to pay for it. Both will stay on under OpenAI, with editorial independence formally written into the agreement, according to a person familiar with the contract.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI. A key thread of reporting in this story.
- 02Media. A key thread of reporting in this story.
- 03M&A. A key thread of reporting in this story.
The precedent is uncomfortable. When Amazon bought The Washington Post in 2013, Jeff Bezos spent the next decade answering questions about whether Amazon coverage was softer than it should have been. OpenAI will face a harder version of that question immediately: TBPN has been, among other things, a venue for adversarial conversations about Sam Altman, GPT model behavior, and the hyperscaler capex cycle that OpenAI is uniquely exposed to.
“OpenAI isn't just buying a show. It's buying the room where Silicon Valley argues with itself.”— Jaeden Schafer
Expect to see this playbook copied. Anthropic, Google, and Meta all maintain in-house media arms of one form or another, but none yet owns a general-interest talk show aimed at the industry's decision-makers. If TBPN proves to be a durable distribution channel for narrative and recruiting — and if regulators don't intervene — the next nine months will see a lot of acqui-hiring pointed at podcasts.
The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, subject to a routine HSR review.
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