Mark Zuckerberg’s Live Podcast Interview Was San Francisco’s Hottest Ticket

More than 6,000 techies streamed on Tuesday evening into San Francisco’s Chase Center, a cavernous event space that is home to the Golden State Warriors and hosts pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo. Engineers, venture capitalists and other Silicon Valley digerati chatted as they found their seats, with Modelos and slices of pizza in hand. The anticipation was high.

They were not there to join a rager of a concert. Instead, they had paid $50 or more a ticket to see Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tape a podcast about artificial intelligence, the metaverse and how he outmaneuvered the rest of Silicon Valley to keep his company winning.

“You underestimate how painful things are going to be, so you can go and do good things,” Mr. Zuckerberg told the crowd about the 20-year history of building his empire, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. He mentioned Aeschylus, the ancient Greek dramatist who is often described as the father of tragedy, in a nod to the lengthy time horizons he thinks in for his company.

The audience, a sea of Patagonia sweater vests and techno-optimism, roared in approval.

Other scions of capitalism piped up too. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, appeared on the jumbotron. Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, flew in from Sweden for the chat. Even Jensen Huang, the very busy chief executive of Nvidia, made a cameo appearance. A full band played musical interludes in between segments.

It was the hottest ticket in San Francisco as Mr. Zuckerberg spoke for nearly an hour and a half with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the creators of the podcast “Acquired.” The hit show, which has become a must-listen for businesspeople the world over, has an audience of more than 800,000 and has taped episodes with the top executives of Uber, Sequoia Capital, Berkshire Hathaway and others.

But Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, was the biggest get yet. “This is a celebration of technology,” Mr. Rosenthal declared onstage.

If it sounds strange that a podcast managed to land some of the world’s highest-profile business leaders, you may not have been paying attention. In recent years, billionaires and top executives in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and beyond have started to opt out of the staid practice of sitting only for traditional media interviews.

Instead, they increasingly prefer to tell their own stories in the friendly spaces of podcasts and YouTube streams, where they often have more leeway to wax — usually at great length — about their pursuits and passions. Many of the interviews are like fireside chats over beers with the boys. And the “Acquired” event showed how these formats have amassed significant gathering power, as podcasters like Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Gilbert, Lex Fridman and Dwarkesh Patel have risen to fame from relative obscurity.

“The democratization of media has allowed everyone to have a personal talk show and now, those in powerful positions have a wide array of options to choose from when they want to get the word out to the public,” said Jules Terpak, a digital culture analyst who also occasionally interviews tech executives for her own podcast.

Not long ago, the tech elite played by the book when it came to dealing with the press. Mr. Zuckerberg and his peers were regulars on the live journalism circuit, appearing at events like the D: All Things Digital tech conference and South by Southwest. They regularly sat for interviews with established news organizations like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and, yes, The New York Times.

As the internet industry emerged in the late 1990s and beyond, media attention was focused on Silicon Valley’s gold rush and wunderkinds like Mr. Zuckerberg, who built Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room and then turned it into a multibillion-dollar company after he dropped out of school.

But as tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, which Mr. Zuckerberg later renamed Meta, grew exponentially in scope and profile, media coverage evolved to focus on the firms’ power and accountability — often to the chagrin of the executives in charge. At the same time, the rise of YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Twitch produced a generation of individual broadcasters, many of whom eschewed traditional reportage for a webcam and a podcast mic.

“There’s a tendency to ‘go direct’ to your audience in tech these days, especially as press coverage has tended toward being more critical over the years,” said Sheel Mohnot, a general partner at the venture capital firm Better Tomorrow Ventures in San Francisco. “A lot of these guys prefer to go to folks who do their homework and present a great story.”

“It’s not that they don’t provide any balance,” Mr. Mohnot added. “They do push back. But they’ll also publish the entire interview, and to C.E.O.s, that really matters.”

In a statement, a Meta spokeswoman said that Mr. Zuckerberg “speaks regularly with traditional journalists, podcasters and creators and finds value in speaking to a range of people with different perspectives and audiences.” (Over the summer, he sat for an interview with Bloomberg.)

Mr. Gilbert, 35, and Mr. Rosenthal, 39, who worked in venture capital, began “Acquired” after meeting by chance at a friend’s Passover dinner in Seattle in 2014. They hit it off and stayed in touch, talking about tech industry trends. They also came up with an idea for a business podcast that would focus on one case study in each episode of a company buying another company.

They started the podcast with that format in 2015, while keeping their day jobs. Mr. Gilbert lives in Seattle and Mr. Rosenthal in San Francisco.

“Acquired” eventually evolved away from acquisition stories to going deep on one major company per episode. Subjects included Microsoft and LVMH, with episodes spanning two to four hours. Each podcast took from dozens to hundreds of hours of research, with Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Rosenthal sifting through books, videos, articles and financial transcripts to construct a narrative of how a company succeeded over a period of time.

After years of the podcast being a passion project, “Acquired” blew up during the early pandemic lockdowns as more people discovered it while stuck at home. In Silicon Valley, the podcast’s fans include Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of services, who listens to the show during his commute, and Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, who told the podcasters how much he enjoyed the show and connected them to Mr. Zuckerberg for the Chase Center event.

“We’re obsessed with why companies work, and so are they,” Mr. Gilbert said in an interview over breakfast in Oakland last week.

Mr. Rosenthal added, “I believe they appreciate the stories we tell, and how they might apply to their own companies.”

The podcast has proved lucrative. Sponsors of “Acquired,” which include JPMorgan Chase, can pay upward of $500,000 for a partnership deal. Mr. Rosenthal left venture capital in 2020 to work full time on the podcast. Mr. Gilbert did the same earlier this year.

(Other independent podcasters have done even better. Joe Rogan, the iconoclastic actor-turned-podcast host who has interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel in recent years, renegotiated a multiyear deal with Spotify this year for a reported $250 million.)

The event Tuesday was a capstone to the success of “Acquired.” Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Rosenthal’s podcast has been listened to for approximately 5.2 million hours on Spotify, according to Mr. Ek — or more than 400 years of audio, in quick back-of-the-envelope math done by Mr. Rosenthal.

For Mr. Zuckerberg, the taping played out like a victory lap. Wearing his hair curly and a graphic black-and-white T-shirt he had custom made, he sat in an armchair onstage, with his image projected behind him on a giant screen.

Mr. Zuckerberg riffed at length about the challenges Meta has faced over time, including a difficult period in the early 2010s when Facebook had to shift from being a social network that was accessed mostly on desktop computers to one used on smartphones. He said he planned to stick around for many more years to come.

“It’s a lot like that Michael Jordan ad,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, referencing a commercial where the basketball superstar once talked about his many losses to other teams over the years. “Even after failing over and over again, he succeeded.”