Om Malik and Ben Thompson on OpenAI Buying TBPN

Om Malik:

“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin

In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.

“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026

Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.

A confident company doesn’t need to blow $150 million on a YouTube show just to keep the press coverage positive.

Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery:

At the same time, I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?

★ Tuesday, 7 April 2026