In late April 2024, podcaster Dwarkesh Patel shared a screenshot on X of a savings account with a balance of $0.14, captioned “Right before the wires for ads on Zuck hit my business account”: the ads had run on his published episode with Mark Zuckerberg. Money arrives at tech interview podcasts along with powerful guests, and the shows pay for being close to them with journalistic distance. This year OpenAI bought a show whose hosts had interviewed the company’s boss. It promised that TBPN, a daily live show, would “continue to run their programming, choose their guests”, and in the same announcement placed it under Chris Lehane, according to TechCrunch the company’s chief political operative.
In that announcement, Fidji Simo, one of OpenAI’s executives, justified the purchase by saying that “the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us”. TBPN is the first media company OpenAI has acquired. The name stands for Technology Business Programming Network. In April 2026 the show was a year and a half old, and OpenAI reportedly paid $100 million to $200 million for it.
TBPN, an eleven-person company, made roughly $5 million from advertising in 2025, and this year, according to the Wall Street Journal, it was on track for more than $30 million. Josh Kaplan, boss of Smooth Media, an agency that represents podcasters, says of such shows, “This is luxurious media with very valuable eyeballs.” The show is hosted by two former startup founders. The studio has a giant gong, which the hosts strike whenever a startup announces a funding round.
An investor podcaster does not consider himself a journalist
After their workout, the TBPN hosts spend the morning with a sauna and the print Wall Street Journal, the paper that exposed the fraud at health-tech startup Theranos. They go on air in jackets and ties. John Coogan, by his own account, sits at his desk “reading physical copies of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times cover to cover.” Exposing Theranos in 2015 took costly investigative work. Another podcaster, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, has hosted the investor podcast Invest Like the Best since 2016 and, according to The Economist, says, “We’re not journalists; we are enthusiasts.”
Nor did two hosts of the tech podcast All-In keep a journalistic distance. They held a fundraiser for Donald Trump in June 2024 and shortly afterwards had him on as a guest. This September, by then president, Trump phoned Nvidia’s boss live on stage during the All-In summit, and Nvidia’s boss put the call on speakerphone.
People in tech mostly talk to each other, says a PR consultant
Lulu Cheng Meservey, a PR consultant to tech founders, says that “when a billionaire AI salesman is telling you whether to buy AI, you are taking that from someone who is entirely unrelatable to you.” By her estimate, nine-tenths of people in tech speak only to other people in tech. Podcasts, according to The Economist, make this worse. Podcaster David Senra describes tech dinners where the conversation veered only between AI optimism and doomerism. “It sounds like they are all reading the same tweets,” he says.
On the day of the acquisition, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote on X, “TBPN is my favorite tech show.” He added, “I don’t expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.”
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