Elon Musk’s X has launched its first business news program — an hour-long daily show starring Bitcoin and business commentator Anthony Pompliano — and its latest investment in original content.
Pompliano, who already has 1.7 million followers on X, 265,000 newsletter subscribers and over 100 million podcast downloads for his “Pomp Podcast,” sees “From the Desk of Anthony Pompliano” (airing each weekday around 10:30 a.m.) as an expansion of the work he is already doing.
“You can’t just take someone who’s been a TV host for years and expect them to thrive on X,” Pompliano, told NYNext. “You need to understand the language, the culture, the nuances of the platform.”
The 36-year-old insists he’s not competing with conventional news networks. Instead, he aims to provide analysis on global news and, as an investor with “skin in the game,” will disclose his own interests.
“I’m not a journalist. I almost look at what we do is we’re providing analysis on what the journalists globally find,” he said. “If you were to take the mainstream media, that’s kind of the front page of the newspaper. What we want to be is the opinion section.”
X has not disclosed terms of the deal but the agreement requires creators to keep their content exclusively on the platform for 24 hours before sharing elsewhere.
This launch follows a recent spate of content deals for X, including shows with Khloé Kardashian, soccer player Midge Purce, and music producers Swizz Beatz and Timbaland.
Of course it’s not the first time a social media company has tried to get into original programming. Meta launched Facebook Watch in 2017, but later scrapped it.
While X is still exploring programming ideas, the company is eager to build out this new business vertical, sources told NYNext.
“It’s a two-way conversation,” Pompliano emphasized of how he uses X to get feedback from viewers on his ideas. “Just as much as you put it out, you’re able to elicit the response back … It makes us really powerful.”
Pompliano, also known as “Pomp,” served as a US Army Sergeant before launching and then selling the social media data company Digaforce. He then took a job at Facebook, and launched both Morgan Creek Digital Assets (focused on blockchain technology investments) and Professional Capital Management, which incubates fintech startups and invests in larger companies.
He said he believes anyone who wants a footprint in the business world has to become a triple threat — someone who operates companies, invests capital and creates content.
And Pompliano is trusted in the cryptocurrency space, which tends to be skeptical of many journalists and legacy institutions.
This year he launched Bitcoin Investor Week, which will be held next week in New York City and feature speakers including Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Mike Novogratz, Vivek Ramaswamy and Cathie Wood. Pompliano will be interviewing all 40 speakers at the conference — something he said is motivated by his desire to keep learning.
Lately, being in the cryptocurrency space has increasingly necessitated having an opinion on politicians and public policy.
“I don’t actually think that the majority of people in business or finance wanted to talk about politics. I didn’t want to,” Pompliano explained. “But when you see a founder is telling you that they personally were de-banked, their company can’t launch because of a regulator somewhere … eventually you say, well, why is this happening? And so you begin to realize, like, wait a second, if we don’t go in and actually engage in this, then we’re just going to get taken advantage of over again.”
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