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.
