OpenAI and TBPN — sure, but why?

To quickly weigh in about OpenAI having acquired TBPN — a few days after the news broke, I’m still not sure why both sides would’ve wanted this deal to happen.

Normally, an acquisition like this would make obvious sense for at least one of the parties involved. But that’s not the case here, or at least I don’t see it somehow.

What’d OpenAI want from a team of 11 people? According to WSJ (and many other sources) this is the plan:

TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show.

What do you mean, “outside of the show”? It’s a daily three-hour livestream, there’s no such thing as “outside of the show”! I really don’t see how the team would be able to contribute meaningfully to anything else than TBPN itself.

And then, why would the TBPN folks sell? They say the revenue is growing, and the company profitable, meaning they’ve got a reasonably clear path towards building a very viable media business. Selling to OpenAI — even for the reported $100 million - inevitably caps both the financial gains and, likely, the audience and credibility.

TBPN is by definition not a journalistic outlet, it’s positioned as an uncritical warm bath show — but it was still an independent one, and this was one of the reasons they were able to book such a wide range of high-profile guests.

No matter how much editorial independence they will end up with under OpenAI, I’m just not sure TBPN will ever be seen the same way, and whether, for instance, representatives of OpenAI’s competition would want to come come on the show.

On the other hand, Kyle Chayka on X had a good point:

“that said… media brands should get the bag when they can because you can always start over, the brand will die so fast if it sucks and you can always start a new one…”

So, it’s definitely a win for the TBPN team — but I’m not quite sure OpenAI will be able to get quite the bang for their buck they expect. Unless, of course, their reasoning is entirely different, in which case I’m very curious to see it all play out.