It’s a tale as old as time: Are you a corporate titan, unhappy with how you or your company are portrayed in the realm of popular opinion? Good news: You can buy the media.
For a business as bad as media, big business sure is obsessed with it. And there may even be signs that a new class of vanity media owners is in the works.
On Thursday, OpenAI acquired the hot tech talk show TBPN, which streams live on YouTube, X, and other platforms. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, made no secret of why his company cut the deal: “TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well,” he posted on X. “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.”
OpenAI applications CEO Fidji Simo told staff at the company that TBPN founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan will advise OpenAI on communications and marketing. “With the mission of bringing AGI to the world 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,” Simo wrote.
Media coverage of OpenAI isn’t constructive, so let’s buy one that will be.
Once again, the most powerful people in the world want a piece of the media business. Larry Ellison, the Oracle titan, is backing his son David’s $111 billion takeover of CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery, after previously backing his acquisition of CBS News owner Paramount last year. The younger Ellison, on a smaller scale, looked to Substack entrepreneur Bari Weiss and saw a nine-figure deal to bolt on libertarian outlet, The Free Press, to jolt CBS into a new era.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told Axios this week that he wants to start a media business, citing poor coverage of critical areas as the source of a lot of bad policy.
“I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media’s the great influencer,” he said.
The titans of industry join fellow travelers like Elon Musk, who is a frequent critic of the mainstream media, encouraging his followers to “share X links” with their friends and family instead; And of course President Trump, who has made the media a near-daily target of his ire, even as he maintains a reputation as someone extremely accessible to that same media.
Corporate giants have a long and complex interest in media. After all Coca-Cola once owned Columbia Pictures; Gulf & Western owned Paramount; General Electric was the steward of NBC and Universal for decades. Now Comcast owns NCBUniversal, Sony Group owns Columbia, and MGM is owned by Amazon.
Tech billionaires have also dabbled in media. Who can forget Jeff Bezos paying $250 million for The Washington Post (how’s that going these days?), Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s deal for the Los Angeles Times, or Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s acquisition of Time. Back in the mid-90s, Microsoft (then led by founder Bill Gates) partnered with NBC to launch MSNBC, in an early effort to create tech-friendly TV.
Media is sexy, it’s fun, and as Dimon (whose daughter is a working journalist) noted, it carries weight and influence. Actually dealing with reporters and running the logistics of a newsroom or media brand is something entirely different. Bezos has laid off scores of journalists after an ill-fated growth play, Soon-Shiong has done the same. Benioff appears to be more interested in AI agents than the magazine business currently. And then there are cautionary tales like Facebook founder Chris Hughes, who snapped up The New Republic with big plans, only to realize that working with journalists is not so easy.
Investor and All In podcast co-host Jason Calacanis posted last week: “Founders: take my advice … do not talk to the press, go direct and do long-form podcasts. Wired and the NYT are as biased as Fox News and MSNOW these days This is a function of their need to pander to one side to survive, be it through $3-a-month subs or rage-baiting ad-based stories.”
It’s a point of view that has picked up steam in Silicon Valley: Executives should ignore the press and speak directly to the public. But in a fragmented media environment, traditional media remains some of the last aggregators of consumer attention. Most consumers aren’t going to spend their days listening to all the podcasts from all the corporate CEOs.
And as any CEO can tell you, building is a lot harder and a lot longer than buying. It’s why Netflix and Paramount each pursued Warner Bros. so aggressively. 100 years of IP doesn’t materialize out of thin air, and neither does institutional credibility and audience.
But the rise of TBPN also shows that it is possible to gain influence fast, with the legacy trappings no longer holding people back. But even there, OpenAI bought it, not built it.
But as the ruined landscape of media companies that were bought and sold by The Powers That Be at the time show, the business, as bad as it is, has a habit of making those buyers regret it eventually. The audience, ultimately, is running the show, as much as owners might like to wag the dog.
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