This is an audio transcript of the Hot Money podcast episode: ‘The Darth Vader of Porn’

Patricia Nilsson
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?

Alex Barker
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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
I wanna 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 Mötley Crüe had its residency that year.

Sarah Jane Anderson
It was the most packed I’d ever seen one of those keynote speeches. Everybody sitting there talking like, I don’t know, I don’t know what he’s gonna say. Car crash-like type of thing. Like, we have to see this to see what happens.

Alex Barker
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.

Sarah Jane Anderson
What was the point of making new content when your content was being plundered? There’s no way to stop, ’cause (inaudible). So as much as I said “content is king”, the real king is traffic. And the tube sites have swallowed up all the traffic.

Patricia Nilsson
More people were looking at online porn than ever, but they weren’t paying for it. Profits have 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 tube sites. 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.

Sarah Jane Anderson
They actually sang underneath their breath the Death March from Star Wars when he came out. (Hums to imitate The Imperial March).

[‘THE IMPERIAL MARCH’ PLAYING]

Alex Barker
The Lord Vader of Porn was a man called Fabian Thylmann, the German software engineer who bought Xtube roughly four years before this conference, the one who started buying cheap sites as a step towards adult industry domination. When he came on stage, he made an impression before saying a word.

[APPLAUSE]

Sarah Jane Anderson
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.

Patricia Nilsson
It was his public debut. Baby-faced Fabian, at just 33, was basically there to introduce himself to an industry that he had conquered in just four years.

Fabian Thylmann
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.

Sarah Jane Anderson
And my row was just like, OK then. Especially in the digital world, a lot of these 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”.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
I’m Patricia Nilsson. He’s Alex Barker.

Alex Barker
From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is Hot Money.

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Act One: The Disrupter.

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How did Fabian do it? He was good at coding. But so were 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.

Patricia Nilsson
The guy who managed to get even the most prestigious of banks and investors to buy in, to look away from the problems 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 travelled the world. I saw meerkats, Cambodian temples, speedboats. 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 travelled to Cologne, in Germany. I went to his no-frills office above a 1980s shopping arcade in 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.

Fabian Thylmann
My name is Fabian. I hate to say my name in English. I don’t like it. My name is Fabian Thylmann. And I’m an investor, I guess.

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Alex Barker
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 Thylmanns 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.

Fabian Thylmann
I was a programmer. I looked online where I could do fun projects in an easy way as a young person without any connections, not being in LA or San Francisco or something. I stumbled over porn people basically online the chat rooms, and started working for them.

Alex Barker
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.

Fabian Thylmann
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.

Patricia Nilsson
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.

Fabian Thylmann
But then I sort of look at other things and let’s see what else is possible to buy. And that’s when you realise more and more how the industry worked and how is what’s there and what isn’t.

Patricia Nilsson
And so the buying spree began. He started with a few more porn 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.

Alex Barker
In 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.

Fabian Thylmann
I don’t know if I had, if I really, in the beginning at least, realised how big this could become. It was a game in some shape or form, you know, to look at all these companies, to be the one of the few people that is actually willing to buy anything because everybody else was like, “What the, why are you buying these? These will all die in two months”.

Patricia Nilsson
Things got more serious when a company called Mansef approached him. The Canadian engineering students who are behind this company had founded sites like Pornhub and Brazzers. These were already big brands.

Fabian Thylmann
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, OK 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.

Alex Barker
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.

Fabian Thylmann
Really, it was incomparable. The amount of money that this team could make with traffic was unheard of in this industry before. It was impressive.

Patricia Nilsson
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, some were definitely in the grey zone of what’s legal.

Alex Barker
I mean, what you were doing when you were buying Mansef is almost like you wanna buy a restaurant and you’re gonna do it with like four different credit cards overlapping. (Laughter)

Fabian Thylmann
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’m like, before the deal, “So who cares?”

Alex Barker
It worked. Fabian bought Mansef, then bundled together all his sites Xtube and Pornhub and Brazzers and Mydirtyhobby in Germany and gave his company a new name. It turned out to be one of the most infamous and ridiculous in porn: Manwin. Fabian swears it wasn’t intentional. But you might remember back in our first episode what the performer Stoya thought of Fabian’s company when it bought the porn studio she was working for.

Sarah Jane Anderson
And I was like, “Oh, I am now tied to a company that is literally named Manwin. This is awful.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Alex Barker
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?

Patricia Nilsson
He was. But there was one big hitch — Fabian’s deal with Mansef, the one that created Manwin, turned on a big promise. Because he didn’t have the money, the 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.

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Act Two: The Money Game.

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Alex Barker
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 advisers, a group called Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton. It’s part of one of the world’s biggest accounting firms.

Fabian Thylmann
I went to Raymond Chabot and told them, “Listen, you know these numbers. You’ve seen them. Why can we not get debt? This is ridiculous. There must be a way to get debt. Even just one year, just 1X leverage, that’s it. Let’s try.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it should be simple.”

Alex Barker
So his advisers 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.

Patricia Nilsson
Before long, the bankers sorted, found a lender. Someone who didn’t mind porn. Someone who would let them borrow almost 100mn. That would have allowed Fabian to cover what he owed and help him buy the Playboy business.

Fabian Thylmann
We had a meeting in Chicago. A term sheet, everything. We celebrated in the evening, had dinner with them.

Alex Barker
Sitting at that dinner, Fabian thought he’d pulled it off. He’d found the magic money pot. It didn’t last long.

Fabian Thylmann
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, Raymond Chabot realised, “Ooh, this is difficult”.

Patricia Nilsson
So to recap, Fabian Thylmann in his early thirties was on his way to wrestle control over the porn industry that had been smashed to bits by tube sites, many of 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.

Alex Barker
By now, we’re in the summer of 2010. Fabian had a small army of advisers. They’re 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 advisers 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 Rosenbloom.

Rick Rosenbloom
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.

Alex Barker
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.

Rick Rosenbloom
Maybe they’re a so-called sin industry. Maybe they’re out-of-favour industry. Maybe they’re what a lot of people call headline risk.

Patricia Nilsson
Headline risk isn’t a fancy financial term, by the way. It actually means the risk of an investor appearing 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 for 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.

Rick Rosenbloom
Once I dug into it and realised 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.

Alex Barker
Let’s just unpack what very profitable tech company means. A grocer might have a margin about 2 per cent. A real moneymaker can have something like 20 per cent. Fabian’s business had a margin of about 50 per cent. 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.

Rick Rosenbloom
You know, it’s a home run. There’s no bell curve for that.

Patricia Nilsson
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 100mn. In this world, five or 10mn is just not worth people’s time. And if you bring a business with a roughly 50 per cent margin, that is likely to get a few ears to perk up. But for porn? Rick was trying to realise what Fabian had learned the hard way. On Wall Street, porn was dirtier than guns, cigarettes and gambling.

Rick Rosenbloom
I knew it was complicated. I knew it wasn’t gonna be easy, but I knew that if I could find, the capital would 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.

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Alex Barker
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 Sin City. At a conference Rick ran into a guy called Jason Colodne, co-founder of a fledgling investment firm called Colbeck Capital. They hit it off.

Rick Rosenbloom
They asked me the kind of deals I did, and I told them, “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.”

Patricia Nilsson
Colodne, 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.

Rick Rosenbloom
Took me probably four or five meetings to get them to really dig in. Jason Colodne 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.”

Alex Barker
That’s quite a statement, right?

Rick Rosenbloom
Yeah, it was. These guys came from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. It’s a pretty strong statement. This wasn’t their first barbecue.

Alex Barker
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 per cent.

Patricia Nilsson
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 Pornland, even a man paying 20 per cent interest can become king.

Alex Barker
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.

Rick Rosenbloom
Once again, it’s the money that enabled them to build the empire. You’re the largest player by a long shot and you dictate a lot of what goes on in your industry.

Patricia Nilsson
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.

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Act Three: Impossible Dreams

Alex Barker
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 per cent interest loan made sense for Fabian, you have to understand the alternative. There was only one really: selling part of the company. Fabian would have to give up control and share the profits. Paying 20 per cent interest, it was worth it just to avoid that. That’s extraordinary number. I mean, it’s like usury.

Fabian Thylmann
Yes, yes, yes.

Patricia Nilsson
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.

Fabian Thylmann
So they could use the same rates they would use for distressed asset, plus it was great. Much safer, right? Same rate but safer, for safer cash flow. Perfect. They loved it.

Alex Barker
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. JPMorgan 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.

Patricia Nilsson
When Fabian started out, he was trying to raise around 100mn and he struggled. But then as the process went on, that number crept up to 170mn. And then by early 2011, Fabian had raised up to 362mn.

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So like us, you’re probably wondering how a pornographer struggling to raise 100mn 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 100mn was accepted, he heard back from one of his financial advisers.

Fabian Thylmann
They said, “Do you have a wishlist?” 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, “OK, sure. We’ll make a wishlist”. We made a wishlist 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 realised, OK, 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 flow-wise, so I don’t care. And then I said, “OK, look, let’s talk about a number you like more.”

Alex Barker
And that’s how Fabian landed a loan of $362mn. 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 YouPorn, 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 YouPorn, he was right.

Fabian Thylmann
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.

Patricia Nilsson
It didn’t take long until people started asking Fabian, where is this all going? Are you going to sell? Take the company public?

Fabian Thylmann
People ask 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?”

Alex Barker
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 recognises 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?

Fabian Thylmann
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a . . . I have a 14-year-old daughter, right, for example. And she knows what I did and she knows 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 VR and what isn’t. They need to understand that there are two.

Alex Barker
Mmm. 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 the kids. Porn is a big part of our culture now. It will be freely available for generations to come. We can’t just compartmentalise 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 mud to many of them. But his power, it didn’t come from inventing sites. It came from buying them.

Fabian Thylmann
I cannot help it that technology changes like the internet shifts flow of money. How it works, shifted it in 50 different industries and it took it into 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 it — change. It just doesn’t. It’s always the bad guy.

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Patricia Nilsson
At the peak of his power, Fabian reckons he controlled 60 to 70 per cent 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 Thylmann? 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.

Fabian Thylmann
And I would have then turned off the websites completely. As in closed off the free content because changing 150mn people’s free content from Day 1 to Day 2 to no longer being there makes them buy stuff.

Alex Barker
This does sound like a completely crazy plan. These days, Pornhub alone is hosting 2bn 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.

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

Fabian Thylmann
Yes, basically, yes. That’s what my plan was. So 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.

Patricia Nilsson
Fabian’s master plan failed. But what stopped him? That’s coming up next time on Hot Money.

Fabian Thylmann
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.

Patricia Nilsson
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 long-time rival had been waiting for. A man who would never tell anyone what his plan was.

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Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
And me, Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Roussillot is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shakerdge. Amanda Kay Wang is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wyse, Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez Casado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Patricia Nilsson
Special thanks to Renée Kaplan and Roula Khalaf at the Financial Times and Mia Lobel, Leital 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+, offering bonus content and ad-free listening across our network for $4.99 a month. Look for the Pushkin+ channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.

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