Episode 2: The Darth Vader of Porn

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So, warning time.

We're two journalists from the Financial Times, and for six months we were set free to pursue one question.

Who controls the porn industry?

There's some content that really won't be suitable for kids.

And only when strictly necessary, we've used recordings of investment bankers in the wild.

I want to take you back in time to 2012, to winter evening in Las Vegas.

The porn industry had convened for one of its flagship conferences.

It's like Davos, but for porn.

Models, computer geeks, moguls.

They were all there, gathered together in a flashy music arena where Mautic Crew had its presidency that year.

It was the most packed I'd ever seen one of those keynote speeches.

Everybody was sitting there talking like, I don't know, I don't know what he's going to say.

Car crash, like type of thing.

Like, we have to see this to see what happens.

Sarah Jane Anderson sat in the hall, not waiting for a rock band, but for a speech.

Sarah Jane had been working in the online adult world since the 90s.

She was on the business and marketing side of things.

It was a close-knit community.

Sarah Jane talks about it like an eccentric family.

But they were on hard times.

Sitting beside her that night were a bunch of porn executives, all from big companies, all facing the same dilemma.

What was the point of making new content when your content was being plundered?

There's no way to stop.

Because okay, so as much as I said content is king, the real king is traffic.

And the tube sites had swallowed up all the traffic.

More people were looking at online porn than ever, but they weren't paying for it.

Profits had evaporated.

It was beyond the panic stage.

Producers were desperate.

They watched their best movies get ripped and streamed online for free by a faceless enemy, the TubeSites.

But finally, at that conference, they would see their problem in the flesh.

They were going to meet the man behind the biggest tube sites.

And as the lights came up, everyone began to hum.

They actually sang underneath their breath the death march from Star Wars when he came out.

The Lord Vader of Porn was a man called Fabian Tillman, the German software engineer who bought X-Tube roughly four years before this conference.

The one who started buying tube sites as a step towards adult industry domination.

When he came on stage, he made an impression before saying a word.

He's wearing a hoodie, very Zuckerberg, and then he sat on the table and crossed his legs.

Pompous?

I just remember a whole row just laughing at that.

Out of ridiculousness.

It was his public debut.

Babyfaced Fabian, at just 33, was basically there to introduce himself to an industry that he had conquered in just four years.

I wanted to talk a bit about myself, since I know that many of you do not really know who I am, where I come from, and such.

And I thought it's better if people know more and then should make it obvious that I'm not that evil person that so many people think I am.

At Myro, it was just like, okay, then.

Especially in the digital world, a lot of those people are faceless nicknames.

So I think he got some credit for showing up and taking the heat a little bit, but I still think it was pretty much, haha, I own you.

I'm Patricia Nelson.

He's Alex Barker.

From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is hot money.

Act 1.

The Disruptor

How did Fabian do it?

He was good at coding, but so are lots of people in the adult industry.

The thing that marked him out was money.

He was good with money in a business that was starved of finance.

He was the guy in the hoodie who convinced Wall Street to bankroll his vision to take control of the adult industry.

The guy who managed to get even the most prestigious of banks and investors to buy in, to look away from the problems of what they saw as a sin industry, and raise more money than anyone thought possible.

Fabian was like Mercury.

Let me tell you what it was like trying to get an interview with him.

He got in touch with me.

Then he went dark.

Then he said yes.

Then he ghosted me.

I watched on his social media feeds as he found love and traveled the world.

I saw meerkats, Cambodian temples, speed boats.

He even posted pics from a London art gallery on the same Saturday that I was there.

I know, he didn't respond to me when I reached out.

Then after more than a year of trying, he finally gave us a date.

We traveled to Cologne in Germany and went to his no-frills office above a 1980s shopping arcade and a nightclub called Vanity.

As we waited, surrounded by merch from his clubs piled up in the corners, I still had this uneasy feeling.

Would he actually answer our questions?

Would he even show up?

And then there he was.

My name is Fabian.

I hate to say my name in English.

I don't like it.

My name is Fabian Turman, and I'm an investor, I guess.

His family is German, but he grew up in Brussels and still lives there, just down the road from where I used to live actually, on the other side of a royal hunting forest.

The Tillmans were a well-to-do family, and like many people in this business, a teenage Fabian basically stumbled into porn, partly for laughs, but also to get ahead.

I was a programmer.

I looked online where I could do fun projects in an easy way as a young person without plenty connections, not being in LA or San Francisco or something.

I stumbled over porn people, basically online in the chat rooms, and started working for them.

He helped build something called NATS, a tracking program for affiliate marketing that took off in the adult business.

It's still around today.

With this software, he could see where traffic was flowing and what porn customers actually paid for.

When Fabian peeked behind the curtains of these businesses, he had the best view in porn land.

It was

interesting

how

exaggerated everybody was talking about how great they were, which they really weren't, or at least not as grand as they made it look.

Fabian thought he could do a better job.

The first business he bought was a small German porn site.

He didn't really have a plan.

Some friends were selling and he could just about get the money together.

But then I started to look at other things and let's see what else is possible to buy.

And that's when you realize more and more how the industry worked and what's there and what isn't.

And so the buying spree began.

It started with a few more important sites in Germany.

A webcams business, then Xtube.

You know the site run by Curtis, the subpoena king, the guy we talked to in the previous episode?

At the FT, we cover this kind of investor-driven buying spree all the time.

It's called a roll-up.

Basically, seeing value in a sector, raising money, and buying up as many companies as possible.

Money's been cheap for quite a while, so plenty of deeply unimpressive buyout groups managed to do it.

But Fabian, he was doing it in porn, hardcore porn, just after the financial crash in 2008.

That's no small feat.

There wasn't much money around.

And with all those free videos flooding the web, everyone thought the porn industry was doomed.

I don't know if I had, if I really,

in the beginning at least, realized how big this could become.

It was a game in some shape or form, you know, to look at all these companies, to be one of the few people people that is actually willing to buy anything because everybody else was like, why are you buying this?

This will all die in two months.

Things got more serious when a company called Mansef approached him.

The Canadian engineering students who were behind this company had founded sites like Pornhub

and Browsers.

These were already big brands.

I was lucky.

They knew about me and they just took the chance and came to me.

But they were talking to four other people at the same time.

And I just decided, okay

this is going to be really expensive i have absolutely no clue how to pay for this but let's just chat with them and let's try

he flew to montreal a few days before christmas in 2009 his wife didn't mind him staying there at least for a few days but fabian was so keen to get the deal done he was stuck there for three months

The thing about Mansef was it bridged old and new.

They had production studios and sites like Brazzers where you had to pay to get access, the traditional way of selling porn online.

But they'd also cracked how to make money from free tube sites.

They could either sell ad space to other pornographers or just channel the viewers to their own pay sites.

The trick was to just get a tiny percentage of all that traffic to actually pay for porn.

Really, it was uncomparable.

The amount of money that this team could make with traffic was unheard of in this industry.

Before, it was impressive.

Fabian loved the business.

The trouble was he didn't have the money to pay for it.

He bought his first sites with support from a few backers, whom he paid back.

The next stage, though, was much harder.

And that's when the financial acrobatics began.

When compared to the rest of the industry, this turned out to be Fabian's real superpower.

People think of him as the German tech guy, but he actually brought financial engineering to online porn.

He conjured up magic money for a business that no mainstream investor wanted to touch.

To make his offer for Mansef, he siphoned cash from other companies, used an asset he wasn't allowed to use, staggered payments, massaged payment dates, every trick in the book.

And just to be clear, someone were definitely in the gray zone of what's legal.

I mean, what you were were doing when you were buying Mansef is almost like you want to buy a restaurant and you're going to do it with like four different credit cards overlapping.

Yeah, let's just figure out a way to do it and then fix it later, you know?

And if it doesn't fix, then I am like before the deal, so who cares?

It worked.

Fabian bought Mansef, then bundled together all his sites, XTube and Pornhub and browsers and my dirty hobby in Germany, and gave his company a new name.

It turned out to be one of the most infamous and ridiculous in porn.

Man Wynn.

Fabian swears it wasn't intentional, but you might remember back in our first episode what the performer Stoyer thought of Fabian's company when it bought the porn studio she was working for.

And I was like, oh, I am now tied to a company that is literally named Man Wynn.

This is awful.

Fabian thought of himself as an opportunistic buyer.

He was making waves.

Everyone in the industry was talking about this rookie-turned kingpin, and he started to think, maybe I could build an empire.

Then came the day when the CEO of Playboy tapped Fabian on the shoulder and asked for a private chat.

Part of the legendary Bunny brand was for sale.

Would Fabian be interested?

He was.

But there was one big hitch.

Fabian's deal with Mansev, the one that created Manwin, turned on a big promise.

Because he didn't have the money, the payments payments to buy the company were spread over a few years.

And right at the end, Fabian agreed to make a balloon payment, a big lump sum.

And if he failed to deliver, the old owners of the company would just get it back.

So he simply had to pay.

But Fabian still had no idea how to get that much money on his own.

And so he thought he might as well try to do the impossible.

He would go to Wall Street.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought.

More thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

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Act 2.

The Money Game.

Fabian reckoned if Wall Street would fund cigarettes, fossil fuels, and even the global arms trade, surely no one would think that porn was worse.

He went to one of his financial advisors, a group called Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton.

It's part of one of the world's biggest accounting firms.

I went to Ramon Chabot and told them, listen, you know these numbers, you've seen them.

Why can we not get that?

This is ridiculous.

There must be a way to get that.

Even just one year, just one X leverage, that's it.

Let's try.

And they're like, yeah, it should be simple.

So his advisors got busy making a slide deck.

Bankers love slides.

Meanwhile, Fabian got busy running his new porn sites.

The ones he bought without really having the money to pay for them.

Before long, the bankers thought they'd found a lender.

Someone who didn't mind porn.

Someone who would let them borrow almost 100 million.

That would have allowed Fabian to cover what he owed.

and help him buy the Playboy business.

We had a meeting in Chicago, a term sheet, everything.

everything.

We celebrated in the evening, had dinner with them.

Sitting at that dinner, Fabian thought he'd pulled it off.

He'd found the magic money pot.

It didn't last long.

The next morning, the owner said, I'm not signing, because he talked to his wife.

So it looked very, very easy and good in the very beginning.

And when this happened, Ramon Chabot realized, oh, this is difficult.

So, to recap, Fabian Tillman, in his early 30s, was on his way to wrestle control over the porn industry that had been smashed to bits by tube sites, many which were run by him.

He'd promised a bunch of pornographers money to take over their companies.

These businesses were profitable, but he thought he could do even better.

But to buy them, he'd committed to a payment schedule that he just could not afford.

He needed to borrow, otherwise he was toast.

But at the same time, no lenders wanted to touch porn.

By now, we're in the summer of 2010.

Fabian had a small army of advisors.

They were all on ridiculously high commissions, millions of dollars, if they could get the deal done.

But they were getting nowhere.

In desperation, one of the advisors called an old contact in New York.

It was the banking equivalent of sending up the bat signal.

And the man that answered, was called Rick Rosenblum.

I'm a special situations investment banker, which is a mouthful, but it's a fancy way of saying

I find capital for people, firms, ventures that don't fit in a typical box.

I'm essentially a finance specialist for alternative investments and misfit toys of the capital world.

Rick's firm is Fuel Break Capital.

It's a sort of marriage broker in the world of finance, a matchmaker for the untouchables.

Maverick companies that need money, but can't get it through the normal channels.

Maybe they're a so-called sinned industry.

Maybe they're an out-of-favor industry.

Maybe they're what a lot of people call headline risk.

Headline risk isn't a fancy financial term, by the way.

It actually means the risk of an investor peering in a newspaper headline.

You see, finance people don't like bad headlines about their investments.

And porn, it's made for bad headlines.

For Rick, it was a lottery ticket assignment.

The chances of success were low, but the potential rewards were huge.

Something like this had never been done for porn, but Rick could see there was something about Fabian's business.

Once I dug into it and realized how profitable it was.

I mean, you can't take the content out, but if you just ignored the content, it was an incredibly profitable technology company.

Let's just unpack what very profitable tech company means.

A grocer might have a margin of about 2%.

A real moneymaker can have something like 20%.

Fabian's business had a margin of about 50%.

For every $2 of revenue his porn sites generated, more than $1 was clean operating profit.

Now that will get any investor's heart pounding.

Yeah, it's a home run.

There's no bell curve for that.

With Rick's experience in New York's world of alternative finance, he knew it tended to be easier to borrow large amounts of money, like 100 million.

In this world, 5 or 10 million is just not worth people's time.

And if you bring a business with a roughly 50% margin, that is likely to get a few ears to perk up.

But for porn?

Rick was starting to realize what Fabian had learned the hard way.

On Wall Street, porn was dirtier than guns, cigarettes, and gambling.

I knew it was complicated.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I knew that if I could find the capital, it'd be highly profitable.

I'm going to keep shaking trees, turning over rocks until I'm out.

I probably

went to 40 or 50 firms.

I got my door slammed in my face almost every time.

But then fate intervenes.

It's another historic moment for the porn industry.

And where else would it be but Las Vegas?

It's always in Cin City.

At a conference, Rick ran into a guy called Jason Kolobny.

co-founder of a fledgling investment firm called Colbeck Capital.

They hit it off.

He asked me kind of the deals I did and I told him, hey, I've got this great deal, but it's got a lot of hair on it.

It's got a lot of noise around it.

And, you know, he said, tell me more.

Kolodny, like his co-founder, was a former Goldman Sachs banker.

Colbeck was interested.

Tempted even, but very wary.

This would be one of their first big deals, and they just weren't too keen on porn.

Not sure about how well the industry was run, but mainly they just wanted to make sure that Fabian's company was financially sound.

Took me probably four or five meetings to get them to really dig in, Jason Kalotany said to me.

Rick, we tried to kill this deal so many times, but every time we did another layer of diligence, it checked out.

In fact, it was probably, I'm paraphrasing here, but something like the cleanest, best-run company we've ever diligenced.

That's quite a statement, right?

Yeah, it was.

These guys came from Coleman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

That's a pretty strong statement.

This wasn't their first barbecue.

Eventually, Colbeck said yes.

Like all of Wall Street, they knew bankrolling a hardcore porn company was dangerous.

But it was such a sound bet, they couldn't resist.

They agreed to underwrite the deal and help raise the money.

And here's why they couldn't resist.

When all the loan costs were blended together, the annual interest rate was more than 20%.

percent

remember fabian's company wasn't that big in an era of cheap money this was breathtakingly expensive but somehow it made sense to fabian

nobody lends to porn companies so if you manage to raise serious money you take it in porn land even a man paying 20 interest can become king you're looking at what

a quarter of the company's revenue going out of the door in interest payments on the debt, right?

Roughly.

Once again, it's the money that enabled them to build the empire.

You're the largest player by a long shot.

You dictate a lot of what goes on in your industry.

The porn industry had been broken by tube sites, and Fabian had just raised the money to assemble the giant conglomerate that would dominate global porn.

In today's super-competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Super Mobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

50-50 doesn't always mean half and half.

Sometimes it's a full fridge flex.

The Maidea 50-50 Flex isn't just a freezer.

It's not just a fridge.

It's both or either.

As the industry's first dual-compartment three-way convertible freezer, the 50-50 Flex gives you 100% control.

It's garage ready for just about anything.

Hosting friends?

Go all fridge.

Stocking up?

Go all freezer.

Need both?

Splitting.

5050.

The Mydea 5050 Flex Convertible Freezer.

The freezer that flexes with your life.

My DEA makes the WOW.

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Act three.

Impossible dreams.

So Fabian managed what nobody thought was possible, raise serious money to begin a roll-up of the porn industry.

But by God, did he pay for it.

To understand why a 20% interest loan made sense for Fabian, you have to understand the alternative.

There was only one, really.

Selling parts of the company.

Fabian would have to give up control and share the profits.

Paying 20% interest?

It was worth it just to avoid that.

That's extraordinary number.

I mean, it's like usury.

Yes, yes, yes.

Then on the other side, the lenders loved this deal.

They came from a banking sector known as distressed finance.

So most of the time they were backing companies in crisis.

Porn was risky, but only to the reputation.

Fabian's business was humming.

So they could use the same rates they would use for a distressed asset.

For us, it was great.

Much safer, right?

Same rates, but

safer cash flow.

Perfect.

They loved it.

And once Fabian had the former Goldman bankers on board, the world of finance warmed to him.

A bank was hired to farm out the debt and find other lenders who wanted to join the syndicate.

JP Morgan put up money, so did Fortress, a well-known New York buyout group.

Even Cornell University was involved at one stage.

Cornell told us they had no idea what their fund manager had done and later sacked him.

When Fabian started out, he was trying to raise around 100 million.

And he struggled.

But then, as the process went on, that number crept up to 170 million.

And then, by early 2011, Fabian had raised up to 362 million.

So like us, you're probably wondering how a pornographer struggling to raise 100 million managed to walk away with more than triple that.

It was hard to find bankers who dared to invest in porn, but once they were on board, their appetite for business conquest turned out to be even larger than Fabian's.

Not long after Fabian's request for 100 million was accepted, he heard back from one of his financial advisors.

They said, do you have a wish list?

And I'm like, what do you mean?

Can you write us a list of what you would want to buy and how much this will cost?

I'm like, okay, sure, we'll make a wish list.

And we made a wish list the next day.

And it came to

200-something million or something that we estimated it would cost.

And then they came to me and said, Yeah, look, let's why are we talking about 100 if you want 250?

I don't understand.

Why don't we talk about 250?

And I realized, okay, they are hungry and they want to do more because obviously the term sheet it was expensive as hell.

It was crazy, really crazy.

But it worked cash war-wise, so I didn't care.

And then I said, Okay, look, let's talk about a number you like more.

And that's how Fabian landed a loan of $362 million.

Jackpot.

Remember what Sarah Jane said?

When she was in the crowd of that porn conference, she was waiting for the man who embodied how the world of porn had changed.

Those out to make money were no longer thinking about the most desirable porn stars or where to shoot the next blockbuster.

Fabian's game was all about internet traffic.

And with that extra money, he started buying it all up.

He acquired UPorn, probably the most popular tube site at the time.

Fabian had finance, scale, and a proven recipe for running sites.

He thought he could make more money from traffic than anybody else.

And with UPorn, he was right.

Shocking, they quadrupled the profits of the sites in two months.

After two months, we were four times as profitable.

Considering that, you buy it for peanuts, you know, in the end.

It didn't take long until people started asking Fabian, where is this all going?

Are you going to sell?

Take the company public?

People asked me all the time.

Also, the lenders asked me once, I think, what's your exit strategy?

I said,

we make 100-something million a year.

Why would I exit this?

For what reason?

There was the social impact, too, from creating this big tech conglomerate that pumped out free porn to the world.

Fabian argues it had a positive effect that people became more tolerant of different sexual identities.

But even he recognizes there is another side to that.

We've spent a lot of time looking at this industry.

I've got two pre-teen boys.

I still struggle with how to explain that there is this vast well of porn out there.

How do I explain it to them?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I have

a 14-year-old daughter, right, for example.

And she knows what I did and she knows how I'm involved in this.

And I told her personally, and she kind of knew before, but kind of didn't, because obviously, every single person in class knows who I am, every single one of them.

In my opinion,

it's more about the fact that,

yes, all of this exists out there, but one,

is it so bad that it does?

And two, you need to be sure that the kids understand

how to

put all of this in the right bucket, so to speak.

Just like they need to understand what in a Marvel movie is real and what isn't, they need to understand it there too.

Buckets.

I wish it were as easy as that.

There are tens of millions of porn videos online, in no small part thanks to guys like Fabian.

And when you're a teen and angsty and learning about your sexuality, it's hard just to put porn in the fiction fantasy, don't try this at home bucket.

But let's be clear, this isn't just about conversations with kids.

Porn is a big part of our culture now.

It will be freely available for generations to come.

We can't just compartmentalize the darker sides of the industry either.

Fabian not only left a mark on our world, but the industry.

He embodied the digital whirlwind that crashed through it.

Pay rates for producers and performers plummeted.

A lot of the traditional industry just went out of business.

Fabian's name is still still mud to many of them.

But his power, it didn't come from inventing sites.

It came from buying them.

I cannot help it that technology changes like the internet shift flow of money, how it works.

It shifted it in 50 different industries and it shifted it in porn.

That's it.

And I just happened to be there when it was there for the taking and I did it, you know.

And I wasn't afraid that it might look weird or bad or whatever.

I guess someone has to be the bad guy, right?

Because it doesn't work without the bad guy in the change.

It just doesn't.

It's always a bad guy.

At the peak of his power, Fabian reckons he controls 60 to 70% of all porn traffic.

We see it all the time.

Tech disruptors pumped up with cash from Wall Street that rapidly become giants and push out other companies because they can offer things on the cheap, or in this case, for free.

When we started reporting this podcast, we set out to find who rules the porn world.

So is it Fabian Tillman?

A decade ago, the answer to that would have been yes.

After his roll-up, Fabian truly was the Darth Vader of porn.

But...

He had some surprising ideas about how to use his power and control.

For one thing, he says he actually

never believed the tube side business model would last.

He has never said this publicly before, but his grand plan was to buy all the tube sites and then

put them behind a paywall.

And I would have then turned off the websites completely.

As in, closed off the free content.

Because changing 150 million people's free content from day one to day two to no longer being there makes them buy stuff.

This does sound like a completely crazy plan.

These days, Pornhub alone is hosting 2 billion visits a month.

It's hard to imagine anybody could just turn off the tap of free porn, especially not the man who managed to convince Wall Street that it was a sure bet for quick and easy money.

So are you saying that if you would have been successful in this plan, maybe we wouldn't have had tube sites today?

Yes, basically.

Yes.

That's what my plan was.

Now imagine YouTube would turn off today and make it pay.

Oh my god.

I don't know what would happen.

Even at two bucks a month, it would be interesting how many would do this.

A lot, I think.

Fabian's master plan failed.

But what stopped him?

That's coming up next time on Hot Money.

My bank said this person is fake.

This is all fake.

This person doesn't exist.

Who's paying this money?

We cannot find anything on him.

It is impossible that we cannot find anything on him.

We'll tell the story of how the Wall Street bankers who made Fabian the kingpin of porn ended up knocking him down.

And that was the moment that a longtime rival had been waiting for.

A man who would never tell anyone what his plan was.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson, and me, Alex Barker.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Edith Roussillo is our associate producer.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Amanda K.

Wong is our engineer.

Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cousado.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Special thanks to to Renee Kaplan and Rula Khalov at the Financial Times, and Mia Lobel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.

Thank you to SimilarWeb for providing our web traffic data.

If you like this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad-free listening across our network for $4.99 a month.

Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.

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