Peter Kafka

Derek Thompson says facts about artificial intelligence pay the most on Substack: Benjamins, against dollars for other facts and dimes for analysis.

Peter Kafka says Thompson left The Atlantic a little more than a year ago, in the summer of 2025, and reads the paid list as somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 subscribers. Derek Thompson says that range is right. Peter Kafka says Thompson has written that the Substack at least equals his Atlantic pay so far. A salary stays flat across the year. The Substack line is one Derek Thompson wants to push up. When 12 months pass after a big article, 10 to 20 percent of subscribers drop, and a falling number makes him feel more harried and chase the ne

Derek Thompson says everything is becoming television because three separate industry moves turned out to be one story.

Spotify, through The Ringer, told him the podcast he hosts should be video, because everything is going to video, so he should think of the show as television. A Facebook brief in an antitrust lawsuit said Facebook cannot be a social-media monopoly: most people on Instagram are not connecting with friends and spend almost all their time watching other people's footage. Derek Thompson took that to mean that Instagram, according to Instagram, is television. OpenAI was trying to launch Sora, which did not amount to much, and he decided that even the organization trying to bui

Derek Thompson says Americans stopped hosting dinner parties in large part because women entered the workforce and men did not take over planning the family social calendar.

In the 1950s heyday of the dinner party and the cocktail party, one of two parents tended not to work. Labor force participation among adult women was something like 20 or 30 percent. Now it is like 60 percent. A spouse at home had time to plan gatherings, which is why so many sitcom plots turn on a boss coming to dinner. Derek Thompson says some of that hosting came from wanting to impress a husband's boss, and some from the isolation of stay-at-home parenthood. He supports women entering the workforce. What disappeare

Derek Thompson says data centers are crowding out housing: in the last year, data center construction is up by more than 60%, while construction of housing, hospitals, offices, and manufacturing facilities is down.

He does not treat a data center as a house. A data center is an igloo for chips, a very cold house for chips, and a house is a house for people. He is passionate about removing barriers to housing where people want to live, and less passionate about clearing the way for every AI company to put a data center wherever it wants. Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard, published the graph behind the 60% figure. Derek Thompson says data centers are eating the economy and crowding out o

Peter Kafka says the Netflix stock is down 40% over the last year because Wall Street is not buying the pitch to watch revenue per subscriber instead of subscriber growth.

Netflix has been telling investors not to worry so much about subscriber numbers and to look at how much each subscriber pays, including through ads sold to some of them, so the company can make more money from each subscriber even when the count is barely growing. Rishi Rajagopalan asks whether the drop is just the failed Warner deal, and notes that Netflix is still profitable and revenue is still growing. Peter Kafka says the market told Netflix not to spend $80 billion to buy Warner Brothers and HBO, and that wanting t

Peter Kafka says Peter Rice is replacing Bella Bajaria as Netflix's content chief.

Rishi Rajagopalan says Netflix laid off about 1,000 people in the past week. The exits include Bella Bajaria, the chief content officer, Doug Belgrad, the VP of film, and, on Monday morning, film chief Dan Lin. Peter Kafka calls that a big erasing of the people in charge of content. Rishi Rajagopalan says Peter Rice comes from Disney and Fox and has an indie film background, and asks what that background means for the Netflix slate. Peter Kafka says Rice will then hire other people to do film.

Peter Kafka says Bella Bajaria described her plan, in a New Yorker profile, as a gourmet cheeseburger: approachable

Derek Thompson says his beat covers three subjects he calls the three A's: abundance, artificial intelligence, and the antisocial century.

When he was at the Atlantic, visitors asked what his beat was and what he did there. He used a canned line. Some beats are like contiguous land masses you can identify on a map. Australia is Australia, an island, and the country is the island. His beat is a little more like Malaysia or Indonesia. You cannot look at an ordinary topographical map and see exactly where Malaysia ends and begins. You need to see where people are drawing the lines. He feels the same way about his beat. It is an archipelago of ideas, and he decides where to draw the line based

Peter Kafka says competing with YouTube and TikTok is a hard business model for Netflix because people can really watch only one thing at a time.

Netflix has spent the last year or so trying to act a bit more like YouTube by bringing over some podcasters, and Peter Kafka says that push has not moved the needle. He says it may be that streaming has topped out, and he does not know that anyone has a good answer for Netflix or the other traditional streamers.

He says a TikTok-style scroll feed will show up on Netflix TV within the next year, then asks why anyone would care. The issue is not vertical video or infinite scrolling. The issue is whether Netflix can offer something people want to s

Kevin usually puts the probability that it all goes super bad at about ten percent. In most of the world that sounds crazy. In the city he is describing, the same ten percent makes him an optimist, because he knows people at fifty, sixty, and seventy percent, and someone at ninety-nine point nine percent. He says people still have agency, are not in the recursive self-improvement loop yet, and still could slow things down, pass some regulations, and coordinate to pace the frontier.

The new podcast with NPR is called Machine Gods. It begins the week of October 19th and will cover the week's news plus interviews with people in the industry. NPR reaches people who would not choose a tech podcast.

Hard Fork was owned by the New York Times. The people who built Hard Fork wanted to build something for themselves. They have started a company, made hires, and are going to spin up a little media company.

Ten years ago, when the book starts, there was no such thing as real AI. In 2016 the leading chatbots were very bad, and the voice assistants of that time did almost nothing valuable. Systems now solve century-old problems in math and science, build entire software programs, and pass graduate-level courses. The people who believed in AGI, a system that can do everything the human mind can, were fringe weirdos in San Francisco. Peers in academia and industry had mostly ostracized them. The progress was not a surprise to the people building the technology.

Oracle's value shot up last fall during an AI boomlet and made Larry Ellison briefly the richest man in the world. The fortune has been cut in half, so he is now eighth. Larry Ellison still put tens of billions of dollars into the Paramount and Warner Brothers deal, now called Skydance.

Oracle owns 15% of TikTok. The stake is no larger than the stake held by Silver Lake or by Andreessen Horowitz. ByteDance keeps a huge stake. Oracle is extremely defensive about any suggestion that Oracle influences the algorithm. Tom Dotan says it would be pretty difficult to move the algorithm so that it directly surfaces pro-Israel content.

Larry is close to Netanyahu. The day after the deal was signed, Netanyahu told influencers that social media is the number one tool and that TikTok is the most important thing to pay attention to. Larry is close to people who believe TikTok is a valuable weapon in propaganda wars Israel is focused on.

Peter Kafka says Oracle sells technology to other technology companies, which is a way for Oracle to be involved with TikTok. Tom Dotan then says Oracle's cloud computing business hosts TikTok's algorithm and is responsible for the security of the algorithm, and calls that a good business to have a piece of. When TikTok in the US came up during the first Trump administration, Microsoft wanted a piece of TikTok. For a time, Walmart and Oracle were going to own TikTok together. Tom Dotan says there are legitimate business reasons to want a piece of TikTok.

David Ellison wanted to combine traditional media companies and scale them to compete with Netflix, Amazon, or YouTube. David Ellison had the money to try because of his father. Redbird is involved and the deal uses a huge amount of debt, but the money is Larry's.

The piece suggests Larry Ellison did not spend much time raising his first two children and tried to make up for it by bankrolling them in Hollywood. Annapurna Studios made well-respected movies and was a financial disaster. Larry Ellison is now doing the same bankrolling for David Ellison. Larry Ellison is not a media person, and Larry Ellison has conflicted feelings about how involved he was with his children.

A grand plan would be easier to understand. People like the Murdochs buy with the intent to control vast media empires, and Elon Musk bought Twitter in part to use it politically. Larry is close to Elon, and Oracle holds a 15% stake in TikTok, so the purchases can look like one project. The reporting found interests and politics, and Tom Dotan says he does not see a project spanning administrations or generations.

Peter Kafka opens the episode by calling Larry Ellison an 82-year-old billionaire and one of the 10 richest men in the world. Larry Ellison bought his son, David Ellison, a media empire. The companies were once called Paramount and Warner Brothers. Peter Kafka says they are now called Skydance.

Peter Kafka also calls Larry Ellison the eighth richest man in the world, tight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and connected to both TikTok and a traditional media conglomerate. He says the public does not know that much about Larry Ellison.