OpenAI buys TBPN, Silicon Valley’s favourite tech talk show, in its first media acquisition
The daily live show, hosted by former founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, will sit inside OpenAI’s strategy organisation and report to chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane. Terms were not disclosed. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence. OpenAI has acquired TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network, the Silicon Valley talk show that [ ] This story continues at The Next Web
The daily live show, hosted by former founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, will sit inside OpenAI’s strategy organisation and report to chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane. Terms were not disclosed. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence.
OpenAI has acquired TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network, the Silicon Valley talk show that has built a cult following among founders, investors, and executives since launching in March 2025.
The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, marks OpenAI’s first acquisition of a media company. TBPN will sit inside OpenAI’s strategy organisation and report to Chris Lehane, the company’s chief global affairs officer.
The show is hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, both former tech founders, and airs daily on YouTube and X for roughly three hours, covering tech, business, AI, and defence. It has attracted an influential Silicon Valley audience, averaging around 70,000 viewers per episode across platforms, and has featured guests including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman himself.
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The show generated approximately $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025 and is on track to exceed $30 million this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sponsors include fintech firms Ramp and Plaid, Google’s Gemini division, and the New York Stock Exchange. TBPN has 11 employees and says it is profitable.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, announced the acquisition internally in a memo to staff, describing TBPN as “one of the places where the conversation about AI and builders is actually happening day to day.”
Simo pledged that OpenAI would maintain TBPN’s editorial independence, with the team continuing to choose its own guests and make its own editorial decisions. Altman, who has appeared on the show multiple times, posted on X that TBPN is “my favourite tech show” and added: “I don’t expect them to go any easier on us.”
The acquisition is an unusual move for an AI laboratory, and raises immediate questions about editorial independence that OpenAI is pre-emptively trying to answer.
TBPN will report to Lehane, a figure who served as a senior strategist in the Clinton administration and who has been described as a political operative skilled at managing press narratives. The show has previously covered OpenAI and its competitors as a subject, a dynamic that will now exist within an ownership structure. Coogan, for his part, noted on X that he has known Altman for over a decade, with Altman having backed his first company in 2013. Whether the promised editorial firewall holds will become apparent over time.
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