OpenAI acquired TBPN—a talk show with 70,000 daily viewers—for a price in the low hundreds of millions. An infrastructure company bought storytellers. In exchange, TBPN founders gave up advertising sales, third-party sponsorships and editorial independence.

Twenty years ago I watched Viacom make the same kind of bet when it bought gaming chat app Xfire for $100 million after losing MySpace to Rupert Murdoch. After that deal, the storytellers (Viacom / MTV Networks) could not figure out the infrastructure business.

XFire was sold four years later to a company that had raised only $1 million in funding.

The lesson from XFire: The founders will have great careers ahead of them. But TBPN is doomed.