Wealth & Money Quote by David Talbot

The line has the careful, slightly defensive cadence of a founder explaining a compromise to a skeptical room. “On the other hand” is doing heavy lifting: it signals an argument already underway, likely about purity versus survival, independence versus capital. Talbot isn’t celebrating Wall Street so much as inoculating against the charge that going public “corrupted” Salon. The pivot insists that the IPO wasn’t an ideological conversion; it was a tool.

Notice how he spends the sentence like a balance sheet, repeating “to build” the way you might stack receipts on a table. It’s a rhetorical move that turns abstract money into concrete journalism-adjacent outputs: circulation, profile, staff. That list also reveals what mattered in the early digital media arms race. “High profile” sits alongside “hire staff” without apology, acknowledging the reality that attention is infrastructure. In late-90s/early-2000s internet culture, credibility often followed scale, and scale required cash.

The subtext is that editorial identity is inseparable from business decisions, even when we pretend otherwise. “Made Salon what it is today” is both a victory lap and a warning: the brand readers romanticize was, in part, purchased. Talbot’s intent is to reframe capital as enabling rather than contaminating - while quietly admitting that in modern media, you don’t just publish your way into influence. You finance it.