‘TBPN’ President Says OpenAI’s Acquisition Was a ‘Marketing and Comms Play,’ Not a Distribution Deal

Dylan Abruscato, President of the daily tech talk show “TBPN,” said OpenAI’s acquisition of the company earlier this year had little to do with the show’s audience and much more to do with absorbing a marketing and communications advisory business the hosts had built on the side.

“I think what a lot of folks got wrong about the deal is that it had very little to do about the show itself,” Abruscato said, speaking at the NEW MEDIA Summit hosted by Yahoo and NEW ECONOMIES during San Francisco Tech Week. “Much more about the interest in kind of us and the kind of brains behind the operation.”

According to Abruscato, “TBPN” had roughly 30 sponsors at the time of the deal, and several of those sponsorship agreements included marketing and communications advisory services the hosts provided as part of the package, an approach he said the show used early on to land its first sponsors. “OpenAI caught wind of that,” Abruscato said. “The impetus behind the deal was basically keep doing the show, but in lieu of those 30 or so comms and marketing advisory clients, shut those down and we’ll be your essential client.”

OpenAI first disclosed the acquisition in April, framing it around the company’s communications needs and pledging to preserve “TBPN’s” editorial independence. Fidji Simo, then OpenAI’s CEO of AGI Deployment, wrote at the time that “the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us.” Abruscato’s account adds a more specific business rationale behind that framing: OpenAI effectively replaced “TBPN’s” roster of advisory clients with itself.

Abruscato said OpenAI reached out the morning after the Super Bowl, following two stunts “TBPN” ran that weekend, including a reskinned version of Claude that served a real answer to the first prompt before rotating through ad reads for “TBPN’s” sponsors in response to every prompt after that. “The next morning they reached out,” he said.

“TBPN” generated roughly $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025 and was on track to exceed $30 million this year, according to WSJ reporting. Abruscato said the business has continued operating independently since the deal closed. “We have separate phones, separate devices, separate emails,” he said. “Internally nothing’s changed.” He added that a few booked guests who compete with OpenAI withdrew after the acquisition was announced, which he called “understandable.”

On the sponsorship side, Abruscato said “TBPN” initially moved to wind down its existing annual, category-exclusive ad deals as part of the OpenAI transition but reversed course after viewer demand. “We walked that back a bit and brought back a couple of sponsors just because our viewers were actively asking for the ad reads,” he said. He said the company has not set a revenue target for next year and is “not actively selling” new sponsorships.

Asked whether OpenAI’s approach signals more acquisitions of independent media properties, Abruscato said no. “It was essentially a marketing and comms play more so than a distribution play,” he said. “By no means was OpenAI trying to get into the podcast world. I can’t speak to anyone else, but this was just a unique situation.”