‘Chasing vibes’ — OpenAI M&A strategy gets more confusing with TBPN

Over 10 months after shelling out an eye-popping $6.4 billion for Jony Ive’s nascent devices startup, OpenAI announced another surprising deal on Thursday, snapping up a media business that streams a three-hour daily tech talk show.

For a company that’s facing intensifying investor scrutiny as it racks up billions of dollars in losses tied to its infrastructure buildout, OpenAI’s M&A strategy is tough to pin down. After the startup, now valued at over $850 billion, announced it purchase of Technology Business Programming Network, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Thursday post on X that, “TBPN is my favorite tech show.”

“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,” Altman wrote.

It’s a pivotal moment for OpenAI, which is prepping for an IPO as soon as this year. The company’s core products — its popular artificial intelligence models and ChatGPT chatbot — face intensifying competition from Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, which is likely to hit the public market first through the anticipated offering of SpaceX.

OpenAI has been reeling in its spending expectations and last month shuttered its Sora video app that quickly went viral after its launch six months earlier. It’s not readily clear how TBPN fits into OpenAI’s strategy, but the AI market is moving so quickly that the most logical moves today may make little sense tomorrow.

“When you have more and more disruptive competitors showing up, they need to build things that give people a unique reason to pick ChatGPT over other AI platforms,” Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, said in an interview. “They are kind of chasing vibes a little bit.”

While not all of OpenAI’s acquisitions will pay off, Newman said the company, fresh off a $122 billion funding close, can afford to experiment. He called TBPN “a fairly small bet for a lot of attention.”

OpenAI didn’t disclose deal terms. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI’s biggest deal to date by far was the purchase of Ive’s io, which pushed the company into the complex world of hardware development for the first time. Ive is legendary in the space for designing the iPod, iPhone, iPad and many other gadgets in his years at Apple, and is angling to get OpenAI’s first devices to market as soon as next year.

In December, OpenAI hired Google’s Albert Lee to lead corporate development, a sign that the company was on the hunt for more targets. It’s purchased several startups across a range of industries since then, including software startup Astral, cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, and health-tech startup Torch. 

OpenAI’s last big splashy acquisition came in the form of a developer rather than a company. In February, the company hired Peter Steinberger, the Austrian software developer behind the viral AI assistant OpenClaw. Much like the surprise TBPN announcement, news of the Steinberger hire lit up social media.

Newman said Altman is likely trying to figure out the company’s next focus area, and whether there’s “an M&A path to relevance.”

“He hasn’t succeeded with a lot of other big, ambitious ideas yet,” Newman said. 

Founded in 2024 by hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays, TBPN quickly rose to prominence within Silicon Valley, cultivating a loyal audience of investors, founders and tech workers. The company has less than 60,000 subscribers on YouTube, but high-profile guests like Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regularly appear on the show. 

In a memo to employees on Thursday, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, said the company believes it has a “responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates.” OpenAI will leverage TBPN’s “amazing comms and marketing instincts,” Simo said, though she added that TBPN will make its “own editorial decisions.” 

Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner, said TBPN wasn’t on his “bingo card” as an acquisition candidate. But he said it could make sense if seen as a way for OpenAI to counter the narrative that AI is a danger.

“If you’re a company like OpenAI, where everyone is kind of leaning forward for news, I think that you just need an established outlet through which you can communicate with the broader world,” Frank said in an interview. 

Paul Nary, an M&A professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, doesn’t quite get it.

“OpenAI acquiring @tbpn makes zero sense to me,” he wrote on X.

In an interview with CNBC, Nary elaborated on his thinking, and said OpenAI’s explanation didn’t help much.

“We’ll give you editorial control, but you’ll still be involved in our company,” Nary said. “So is there a conflict of interest there, and what does it mean for the business going forward?”

Nary said media and entertainment transactions are some of the most likely to fail, but he suggested that TBPN’s size doesn’t present a lot of financial liability to OpenAI. He does expect the show to change a lot over time.

“What this looks like a year from now, in terms of the show or what the founders are doing, I think that there will be something different going on from what it is today,” Nary said.

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