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Silicon Valley Is Making A Media Empire
Courtesy of MTS on X
The hottest acquisition targets in Silicon Valley have suddenly become news and media startups.
The Big Picture: Recently, the tech industry has had an adversarial relationship with traditional news organizations and the ecosystem of influential digital outlets. But with a sudden rise in newsfluencers across social platforms, tech titans are discovering new voices with a much rosier view of their work… and are now paying handsomely to support that growth.
Behind The Scenes: The theme of Silicon Valley’s newfound love of media: if you can’t win them over, disrupt them.
VC giant Andreessen Horowitz is funding the launch of Monitoring the Situation — “a 24/7 livestream of elite X users reacting to real-time headlines,” per Axios.
OpenAI recently acquired the tech industry’s favorite livestream show, TPBN, for an undisclosed amount.
Peter Thiel is backing a startup called Objection.AI that lets people challenge journalistic stories about them using human investigators and AI agents — basically “fact-checking” the fact-checkers.
Final Broadcast: While the tech elite would pitch their association with these shows as creating an inside-baseball space to talk shop and connect with fans, many view it as the installation of mouthpieces for company talking points. It doesn’t help with optics that TPBN will report to OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, and will support the company’s marketing and communications.
While companies are well within their rights to form their own propaganda press channels, the risk is that they become echo chambers that shape their societal narrative… while leaving professional journalists on the sidelines.
The Future: Prepare for these shows to juice activity on prediction markets, essentially creating a version of r/WallStreetBets that roots for the big guy.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.