OpenAI buying TBPN wasn’t on our bingo card!
The AI giant reportedly paid in the “low hundreds of millions” for the tech podcast, which streams live for three hours daily, and is hosted by founders John Coogan and Jordi Hayes.
For OpenAI, the move is an attempt to reshape the narrative around AI and its products. What the company is really paying for is influence and vibes.
Both TBPN and OpenAI said the show would maintain editorial independence, even as the TBPN team reports to OpenAI’s chief lobbyist and helps the company with marketing and communications.
The question now is whether OpenAI’s bet will pay off—and what the acquisition says about broader creator strategies.
Trust in AI remains low, even as more people use it. In February, OpenAI’s ChatGPT surpassed 900 million weekly active users, per the company.
But 76% of Americans said they could trust AI “hardly ever” or “some of the time,” according to a March Quinnipiac University poll. Another 55% said they think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives.
Meanwhile, podcasters and creators are now some of the most trusted sources of news and information. In theory, TBPN could help boost OpenAI’s public image.
But TBPN has a very specific, niche audience of Silicon Valley insiders, founders, investors, developers and tech bros. As of Tuesday, the show had about 72,500 subscribers on YouTube. Its audience members don’t need convincing about the benefits of AI. They’re already bought in.
OpenAI needs to reach people who are still unsure—many of whom likely haven’t heard of TBPN. That includes people working within the creator economy who we spoke to after the news broke!
And changing people’s minds about AI is hard. Even people in the Quinnipiac poll who said they knew a “great deal” about AI were more likely to have negative, rather than positive views, about the technology. Still, they were roughly twice as likely than those who knew “hardly anything” to say the tech would do more good than harm.
One thing that may work in OpenAI’s favor is that many people have likely seen snippets of TBPN without realizing it. That may be what the company is betting on.
TBPN has flooded X and other social apps with clips of the show and generated buzz through other attention-grabbing campaigns, like an Emmy consideration push that included billboards. The show also frequently shares baseball-style “trading cards,” like this one, to highlight personnel moves in the tech industry, which are then retweeted and viewed tens of thousands of times.
Zooming out, we don’t expect every major tech firm to start shelling out hundreds of millions to acquire creators. (That’s not to say that tech executives won’t continue going on friendly podcasts and trying to shape the narrative in other ways.)
But the acquisition is symbolic of the current moment in the creator economy.
What people choose to watch is becoming extremely fragmented. And as algorithms dictate more of our social media behaviors, people may not even know who is producing the content they see on their feeds.
Many companies are adjusting their strategies to meet the moment, choosing to partner with creators who have targeted audiences, instead of the largest number of followers. Prior to the acquisition, TBPN was sold out for brand sponsorships for the year and on track to make $30 million in annual revenue.
It remains to be seen what happens with those brand deals, as all sponsor logos disappeared from the show after the deal was announced. There are also many other questions: Will TBPN be able to retain its core audience? Will OpenAI competitors still appear on the show? Are Coogan and Hayes still going to be hosting two years from now?
We dive deeper into all of this on our podcast this week, publishing Thursday.
How to Launch a Brand in 2026
Alix Earle’s new skincare brand, Reale Actives, may just have had one of the most successful celebrity beauty launches of all time: It brought in $1 million in sales within five minutes of becoming available last week, according to Puck. By 4 p.m. on launch day, the entire product line was sold out.
A lot of the nascent brand’s early success comes from Earle’s smart marketing strategy. For roughly a week, she teased the launch through posts and videos on her social media accounts, encouraging people to follow an account called @wtfisalixdoing to find out more. That generated excitement and intrigue—and gave the brand a built-in following of about 400,000 on Instagram when she changed the account name to @realeactives after launch.
She also tapped other influencers to spread the word, sending them locked suitcases with products and puzzle pieces that ultimately filled a billboard in New York’s SoHo neighborhood that revealed the brand.
But she didn’t just rely on social media. Earle appeared on traditional talk shows, including “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Drew Barrymore Show” and gave interviews to media outlets including Fortune. Her brand appeared on a billboard in Times Square, and she even went to the top of the Empire State Building, which was lit up in green in honor of her brand colors.
The savvy use of social media is to be expected from Earle. What’s more surprising is the heavy reliance on traditional media. That shows how it’s not one or the other and that brands (and creators) need to be firing on all cylinders.
Now, the real test will be whether Earle can turn Reale Actives into a long-lasting brand. That will ultimately depend on the quality of the products, not her marketing skills.
Soundbite
A successful campaign in 2026 must operate like a full-time production studio. Candidates and incumbents should center each day on content creation.
David Plouffe is encouraging politicians to take cues from creators.
That doesn’t just mean making TikTok videos. “To win today, you need to harmonize your message across the ever-growing list of ways people are reachable: traditional TV, connected TV, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, podcasts, Snapchat, radio, video games, community events, door-to-door canvassing, phone calls and texting,” wrote Plouffe, who worked with President Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris.
His New York Times op-ed comes as Democrats have lagged Republicans on influencer and social media strategies. We went deeper on this topic with Democratic Senator Cory Booker here and California Attorney General Rob Bonta here—both of whom are appearing on more podcasts themselves these days, including Scalable!
The Round Up
LinkedIn discussed acquiring newsletter publisher Beehiiv, Semafor reported. Beehiiv declined to comment. LinkedIn didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta Platforms may stop funding its independent Oversight Board after 2028, the newsletter Platformer reported. The board, which launched in 2020, was formed in response to criticism over how Meta handled difficult content moderation decisions. Now Meta has moved to using more automated moderation systems, as well as user-driven approaches like X’s community notes.
Spotify announced Prompted Playlists for podcasts, which lets users describe what they’d like to listen to, such as political analysis or a funny interview. Spotify will build a personalized playlist of relevant episodes, much like its curated music playlists.
Red Seat Ventures, the podcast talent company owned by Fox, announced Speakeasy, its new platform that offers podcast hosting, distribution and monetization services.
Picsart, a design and editing software, launched a creator monetization program. Creators, regardless of their follower count, can earn money from creating content using and promoting Picsart tools and sharing it to their own social media accounts. The payouts are based on engagement, such as views, comments and shares.
Creator Moves
MrBeast hosted a livestream on his YouTube channel over the weekend that included 50 widely-followed streamers, such as Ludwig and Pokimane, who competed to win $1 million in cash to give to their followers. MrBeast co-hosted the stream with iShowSpeed, who has recently become one of the most popular streamers. The video racked up more than 58 million views overall, with the livestream peaking at about 1 million concurrent viewers.
Natalie Marshall, the creator better known as Corporate Natalie, launched Expand Co-Lab, an influencer marketing agency. The new firm says it will differentiate itself in a crowded market of similar firms by bringing creators into the process early to advise on strategy and messaging rather than providing “rigid briefs” and brokering one-off campaigns.
