After a stablecoin, digital token, a couple of memecoins, and a bitcoin mining platform, the Trump family is now looking to expand their crypto empire with a debit card.
The family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial is launching a debit card as early as this year. Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, are all listed as active co-founders of the venture, while the President was “co-founder emeritus” until he took office.
“We are definitely rolling out a debit card that’ll bridge … crypto assets with everyday spending … we’ll be rolling out a pilot program here in the next quarter, and that debit card will either be live (in) Q4 or Q1 26,” CEO Zach Witkoff said at a crypto conference in Singapore on Wednesday, with co-founder Donald Trump Jr. by his side. Zach’s father is Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Russia negotiator, and all-around fixer.
Crypto debit cards are not a new concept. The world’s two largest payment networks, Visa and Mastercard, both offer crypto-linked cards in partnership with various crypto trading platforms. They have interesting tax implications, though: every single transaction you make is subject to taxes (no matter how small), but you can also end up with tax write-offs. If the fair market value of your cryptocurrency is lower than it was at the time you purchased it, users can claim a capital loss to reduce taxes for the year. That’s not a far-off reality, considering how volatile cryptocurrency tends to be.
World Liberty Financial has been around for a whole year now to advance its stated goal of “decentralizing finance,” aka getting intermediaries like banks out of the way so financial transactions can be conducted with less oversight.
Crypto is usually under more regulatory scrutiny, but that was then, and this is now. Ever since Trump took office, he has made it a mission to legitimize cryptocurrency’s place in the American financial system.
Under Trump, the once-strict Securities and Exchange Commission is now unveiling crypto regulation and projects to make the United States “the crypto capital of the world.” Some enforcement actions against crypto companies like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Kraken were dropped. And, in response, the industry is generally back to operating as if the good times will never end.
Trump also spearheaded legislation that legitimized the role of stablecoins and signed it into law in July, just a couple of months after his family’s crypto venture debuted its own stablecoin USD1.
“My father was the first guy to run as sort of a pro-crypto president,” Donald Trump Jr. said at the conference on Wednesday.
Even though Trump was once a crypto-skeptic himself, his newfound belief —and the regulatory power to complement it— only made his family richer than ever.
Since World Liberty Financial’s launch, the Trump family has made around $500 million from that project alone, according to Reuters calculations. Trump and his sons’ stake in World Liberty Financial hit $5 billion after the company’s digital currency began trading earlier last month.
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#Trump #Launching #Crypto #Debit #Card
The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times‘ revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.
With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.
So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player’s flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.
The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times‘ revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.
With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.
So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player’s flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.
#NYT #Mini #crossword #answers #hints #April">NYT Mini crossword answers, hints for April 20, 2026
The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times‘ revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.
With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.
So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player’s flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.
Today’s launch of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite aboard Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket was a partial success. The New Glenn touched down on its landing pad without incident, making it the second launch and landing for the first stage booster, and officially giving Jeff Bezos a reusable launch vehicle. Unfortunately for AST SpaceMobile, the mission was less successful. Its cell-tower-in-space was delivered to a lower orbit than expected by the second stage of the launch vehicle, rendering it functionally useless.
While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited.
Bezos, for his part, posted a video of the landing on X without comment.
Today’s launch of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite aboard Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket was a partial success. The New Glenn touched down on its landing pad without incident, making it the second launch and landing for the first stage booster, and officially giving Jeff Bezos a reusable launch vehicle. Unfortunately for AST SpaceMobile, the mission was less successful. Its cell-tower-in-space was delivered to a lower orbit than expected by the second stage of the launch vehicle, rendering it functionally useless.
While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited.
Bezos, for his part, posted a video of the landing on X without comment.
#Blue #Origin #successfully #reused #Glenn #rocketBlue Origin,News,Science,Space">Blue Origin successfully reused its New Glenn rocket
Today’s launch of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite aboard Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket was a partial success. The New Glenn touched down on its landing pad without incident, making it the second launch and landing for the first stage booster, and officially giving Jeff Bezos a reusable launch vehicle. Unfortunately for AST SpaceMobile, the mission was less successful. Its cell-tower-in-space was delivered to a lower orbit than expected by the second stage of the launch vehicle, rendering it functionally useless.
While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited.
Bezos, for his part, posted a video of the landing on X without comment.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA|October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA|October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA|October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
![OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2266645295.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 "OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
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Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
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