Ed Zitron Is Worth Your Time, and I’m Tired of Pretending Otherwise

Somebody finally put Ed Zitron on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a charcoal gray T-shirt and let him say the quiet part out loud. Vanity Fair just ran a piece on him, and my first reaction reading it wasn’t surprise. It was relief. Relief that the rest of the media is catching up to something I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen for a while now: this guy is one of the sharpest voices covering tech right now, and more people need to be paying attention.

I’ve been a fan of Ed’s for a good stretch. Where’s Your Ed At, the Better Offline podcast, all of it. And the thing that gets me isn’t even that he’s skeptical of the AI boom, plenty of people are skeptical. It’s how he’s skeptical. He shows his work. He’s out here adding up actual dollar figures, actual capital expenditure numbers, actual revenue against actual spend, and he’s asking the question that somehow almost nobody in financial media wanted to ask until recently: where’s the money.

That CNBC moment sums up why I respect him so much. Host tests him on air, brings up the Uber comparison, the whole “every big company looked bad on paper before it figured itself out” line. And Ed doesn’t flinch. He just says they’d be the first this bad, other than WeWork. That’s it. No hedging, no corporate softening, just a guy who’s done the math and isn’t afraid to say what the math says in front of the exact audience that doesn’t want to hear it.

I think that’s the part people are finally waking up to. It’s easy to write Ed off as a hater or a contrarian looking for clicks. I don’t see it that way at all. I see someone who got tired of watching an entire industry get covered like a religion instead of a business, and decided to just cover it like a business. Revenue. Cash burn. Circular financing arrangements that don’t hold up when you actually trace where the money’s going. That’s not hot takes, that’s reporting, and it’s reporting a lot of outlets have been too polite or too invested to do themselves.

And look, you don’t have to agree with every conclusion he lands on to get value out of reading him. I find myself nodding along more often than not, but even on the stuff where I’d push back a little, I come away from his writing sharper than I was before I opened it. That’s the whole point of good analysis. It should make you think harder, not just make you feel validated.

So if you haven’t read him yet, do yourself a favor. Start with the newsletter, get a feel for how he builds an argument, then go listen to an episode of Better Offline. It’s not always comfortable. It’s not supposed to be. But it’s honest, it’s sharp, and in a media environment that’s spent the last couple years mostly cheerleading, that’s worth more than people realize.

Ed’s earned the bigger stage he’s getting right now. Glad the rest of the world is finally showing up to it.