OpenAI has struck a deal to acquire TBPN, a technology-focused talk show popular in Silicon Valley, making an unexpected move into broadcasting after pledging to abandon “side quests” and focus on its core business.
The ChatGPT maker had purchased the 11-person company in a “low hundreds of millions of dollars” deal, according to a person with knowledge of the terms.
Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/VfGEx
I have never heard of this show
Me neither, I feel like all the publications talking about how it’s so popular are gaslighting me or being taken by some bullshit bottled streaming numbers
TPBN YouTube channel (their primary outlet) has 64k subscribers, averages 5k views per podcast episode. Except for the OpenAI announcement that has 13k, and all the comments are negative.
For “low” hundreds of millions of dollars. Wtf.
One of the founders is the guy who invented Soylent, and now shills nicotine pouches.
A lot more on X (320k followers and 110k views on the latest episode). And those are the livestream platforms, I’d imagine a lot of people use something like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to listen to them afterwards.
X views are really questionable though. You scroll across this in a feed, it counts as a view. (This is great for juicing your numbers if people are only familiar with other platforms’ numbers.
It’s says it’s popular in Silicon Valley. Is that where you work?
That’s where I work, and I’ve never heard of it.
It’s probably just tech bro bullshit though, pump and dump, not something actual engineers would listen to.