Podbit · Up First from NPR
The DOJ approval is the big hurdle cleared, but the FCC still needs to sign off on CBS's local stations, EU and UK regulators are reviewing, and Democratic state AGs are increasingly aggressive about taking deals like this to court.
Where this was said
At 9:29 · chapter starts 8:24
Folkenflik's most pointed observation is that this outcome was widely predicted — not because the antitrust case was open-and-shut, but because of politics. [1] — David Folkenflik "Trump has openly said he wanted CNN in the Ellisons' hands. The Ellisons took over CBS, installed a right-leaning editor, and Trump liked w…" 08:24 Trump had publicly said he wanted CNN under the Ellisons' control. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder and one of the world's richest individuals, and his son David acquired Paramount's parent company last year. David Ellison installed Bari Weiss — founder of the center-right Free Press — in charge of CBS, generating significant controversy. Trump approved of the editorial direction, and his regulators followed suit. Folkenflik's verdict: the DOJ gave the merger 'the matador defense' — stepping aside and letting it through. The Ellisons' Trump alignment effectively pre-empted any meaningful antitrust scrutiny.
Trump has openly said he wanted CNN in the Ellisons' hands. The Ellisons took over CBS, installed a right-leaning editor, and Trump liked what he saw. When the regulator is the regulated's biggest fan, don't expect an antitrust fight.
The simplest customer acquisition funnel: write content every day, send that audience to a waitlist landing page, and collect emails. Those subscribers already trust you and know the pain they want solved — that's why they become your first 100 customers.
Content before code. A $42K/month founder lays out the full playbook: push content for 14 days, mine audience pain points, build a product for the biggest one, launch to that core group, then double down on what works. Audience validation is the unfair advantage most founders skip.
Most founders build first and market later. This founder flips it: 14 days of content to warm up the audience and surface the real pain points before a single line of code is written. The result is a ready-made group of users waiting on launch day.
The temptation is to build a feature-rich product. This founder's answer is the opposite: pick the single biggest pain point from your audience and build a product that solves only that. Focus is the feature.
There's no need to launch to the world on day one. The founder pushes the product directly to the core group that originally provided the pain-point validation — they already want the solution. That's how the first users become paying customers without a single cold acquisition.
After the initial launch, growth comes from a simple loop: find which content resonates, double down on it, and use it to attract more people just like your core audience. It's not complex — it's consistent.
Perfecting a product for months guarantees nothing. The Starter Story founder pressed publish on his meticulously crafted site and watched zero users arrive — the brutal lesson every founder needs to hear.
The world's best companies didn't buy their first customers — they went to where those customers already were and created content for them. Free channels like Reddit aren't a hack; they're the actual strategy.
A single link post on Reddit drove 100 visitors to Starter Story in minutes. Then the moderators deleted it. That deletion became the catalyst for a far smarter strategy.
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