The same week it closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, OpenAI made a different kind of bet - buying a media company.
OpenAI announced Thursday it has acquired TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network, a daily livestreamed tech and business talk show hosted by founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays. The deal is OpenAI's first acquisition of a media company. Terms were not disclosed.
What TBPN Is
TBPN launched in March 2025 and quickly became what TechCrunch described as a SportsCenter for the tech industry - a live, three-hour daily show where top executives come to speak candidly with fellow insiders. Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff, and Sam Altman himself have all appeared. The show averages 70,000 viewers per episode across YouTube and X, has 11 employees, generated $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025, and was on track to exceed $30 million in 2026. Sponsors have included Ramp, Plaid, and Google's Gemini. It also holds a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange.
Coogan and Hays are former tech founders with deep Silicon Valley ties. Altman funded Coogan's first company in 2013. The show was originally called "Technology Brothers" before rebranding.
Why OpenAI Is Buying It
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, was direct in her memo to staff: the standard communications playbook does not apply to OpenAI. The company frames this as a responsibility - that driving a shift as significant as AGI requires building a genuine public space for conversation about AI, with builders and users at the center.
TBPN will be housed within OpenAI's strategy organization and report to Chris Lehane, the company's chief global affairs officer. Simo promised the show will retain full editorial independence - choosing its own guests, running its own programming, making its own editorial decisions. Altman echoed this publicly, saying he does not expect the show to go easier on OpenAI and acknowledged he will "do his part to enable that with occasional stupid decisions."
The Questions Worth Asking
The stated editorial independence is credible on its face - it is foundational to TBPN's value, and destroying that credibility would make the acquisition pointless. But the structure matters. A show that now reports to the person who runs OpenAI's political and communications strategy, inside a company approaching an IPO, covering the same company and its competitors daily, is operating under new constraints regardless of what the memo says.
From my experience advising companies on AI adoption, the relationship between a company and the media covering it always shapes the coverage in ways that are hard to see from the outside. Whether TBPN maintains its edge under OpenAI ownership is something its audience will judge over time, not by what any internal memo promises today.
