A montage of Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, and waving US flags set to a remix of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck blasts out as the intro for the tech billionaire’s interview with Sourcery, a YouTube show presented by the digital finance platform Brex. Over the course of a friendly walk through the company offices, Karp fields no questions about Palantir’s controversial ties to ICE but instead extolls the company’s virtues, brandishes a sword and discusses how he exhumed the remains of his childhood dog Rosita to rebury them near his current home.
“That’s really sweet,” host Molly O’Shea tells Karp.
If you are looking to hear from some of tech’s most powerful people, you will increasingly find them on a constellation of shows and podcasts like Sourcery that provide a safe space for an industry that is wary, if not openly hostile, towards critical media outlets. Some of the new media outlets are created by the companies themselves. Others just occupy a specific niche that has found a friendly ear among the tech billionaire class like a remora on a fast-moving shark. The heads of tech’s largest companies, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella and more, have all sat for long, cozy interviews in recent months, while firms like Palantir and Andreessen Horowitz have branched out this year into creating their own media ventures this year.
At a time when the majority of Americans distrust big tech and believe artificial intelligence will harm society, Silicon Valley has built its own network of alternative media where CEOs, founders and investors are the unchallenged and beloved stars. What was once the province of a few fawning podcasters has grown into a fully fledged ecosystem of publications and shows supported by some of the tech industry’s most powerful.
While pro-tech influencers like podcast host Lex Fridman have for years formed a symbiotic relationship with tech elites like Elon Musk, some firms have decided this year to cut out the middleman entirely. In September, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that it had launched an a16z blog on substack. One of its prominent writers, investor Katherine Boyle, has a longstanding friendship with JD Vance. Its podcast has meanwhile grown to more than 220,000 subscribers on YouTube, and last month hosted OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, who counts Andreessen Horowitz as a major investor.
“What if the future of media isn’t controlled by algorithms or legacy institutions, but by independent voices building directly with their audiences?” the firm wrote in its Substack announcement. The firm once invested $50m in digital media upstart BuzzFeed with a similar vision, only to see it fall into penny stock territory.
The a16z Substack also announced this month that the firm was launching an eight-week new media fellowship for “operators, creators, and storytellers shaping the future of media”. The fellowship includes collaborating with a16z’s new media…
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