Today’s article is a short one – I’m working on a much longer piece detailing the AI industry’s ongoing struggles as companies continue to flail.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced that it had acquired TBPN, a podcast for techbro celebs and “innovators.”¹ Having recently raised another $122 billion, the company evidently thought it was a good idea to spend a few hundred million of that on a podcast. From the announcement by OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo:

"As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift. And with our mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center."

Sure, sure, the “standard communications playbook doesn’t apply” because you’re so special. Got it.

Just a few weeks ago, Simo instructed staff to focus on the company’s primary business lines, saying, “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.”²

But don’t worry, because according to FT, a person in the know dismissed the idea that the deal was a distraction for a company competing against Google and Anthropic, saying, “Researchers and engineers will not devote time to this and it’s not a new product, so it’s not a side quest.”³

The company insists of course that TBPN will remain independent, with OpenAI founder Sam Altman writing on Twitter that, “I don’t expect [TBPN] to go any easier on us, am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.”

But in spite of what OpenAI would have us believe, this acquisition makes zero business sense and is definitely a side quest. As Kyle Chayka posted, “OpenAI has no reason to own a media company besides tacitly promoting its own causes, imagine competitors buying ad space on something it owns outright…”

To that I would add: imagine competitors appearing on something OpenAI owns outright.

This comes on the heels of the company abandoning its controversial sexbot mode and abruptly shuttering its Sora video product, almost certainly due to its exorbitant costs; Sora was reportedly burning at least $1 million per day while steadily losing users.⁴

So once again, OpenAI has blown a few hundred million on yet another side hustle. But hey, if they can continue to lure advertisers TBPN may turn out to be the only profitable OpenAI product.

1. https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/ ↩︎
2. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/902368/openai-sora-dead-ai-video-generation-competition ↩︎
3. https://www.ft.com/content/4fe4972a-3d24-45be-b9fa-a429c432b08e?syn-25a6b1a6=1/ ↩︎
4. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/29/why-openai-really-shut-down-sora/ ↩︎