The Most Powerful People in the World Are Obsessed With Media Again
Sam Altman is buying his favorite show, Larry Ellison is buying CNN to merge it with CBS News, Jamie Dimon is toying with launching a venture. It may mark a new era of vanity media owners.

By Alex Weprin
April 3, 2026 7:53am

-snip-

On Thursday, OpenAI acquired the hot tech talk show TBPN, which streams live on YouTube, X and other platforms. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, made no secret of why his company cut the deal: “TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well,” he posted on X. “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.”

-snip-

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told Axios this week that he wants to start a media business, citing poor coverage of critical areas as the source of a lot of bad policy.

-snip-

Media is sexy, it’s fun, and as Dimon (whose daughter is a working journalist) noted, it carries weight and influence. Actually dealing with reporters and running the logistics of a newsroom or media brand is something entirely different. Bezos has laid off scores of journalists after an ill-fated growth play, Soon-Shiong has done the same. Benioff appears to be more interested in AI agents than the magazine business currently. And then there are cautionary tales like Facebook founder Chris Hughes, who snapped up The New Republic with big plans, only to realize that working with journalists is not so easy.

-snip-

But as the ruined landscape of media companies that were bought and sold by The Powers That Be at the time show, the business, as bad as it is, has a habit of making those buyers regret it eventually. The audience, ultimately, is running the show, as much as owners might like to wag the dog.

In March 2012, Hughes purchased a majority stake in The New Republic magazine. He became the publisher and executive chairman and also served as editor-in-chief of the magazine.[17] In December 2014, shortly after the magazine's centennial celebration, editor Franklin Foer and literary editor Leon Wieseltier were "driven out," and dozens of other staff and contributing editors resigned after a new chief executive, Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo! employee, described the new direction of the magazine as a "vertically integrated digital media company."[18] The magazine was forced to cancel its upcoming issue due to the staff departures.[18]

The magazine was not profitable during Hughes' tenure.[19] On January 11, 2016, Hughes put The New Republic up for sale, saying he had "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today's quickly evolving climate."[19] Hughes' ownership of The New Republic was described by The New York Times as a "vanity project."[20] He sold the magazine on February 26, 2016, to Oregon publisher Win McCormack.[21]