u/ezitron

Hello all,

I rarely give much insight into the future of the show, but wanted to share some upcoming episodes (in no specific order):

• Steve Burke of GamersNexus on circular financing.
• Tom Dotan on Oracle and Larry Ellison.
• Nick Devor on Coinbase's Trading Cards and the overall prediction markets.
• Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times on Why You Should Care About Bonds.
• Nick Nemeth and Sam Koppelman on Private Credit.
• Paul Kedrosky and Ed Elson on the post-mid-terms economy.

Monologues will continue as ever, but I'm excited to start planning out and broadening what the show is about.

I'm also working on confirming a few really exciting guests for CES.

Really awesome piece :) A profile of sorts followed by a Q&A.

https://archive.ph/IG97X - full archive link.

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, AI’s foremost critic is flouting the dress code. This building is the Vatican of big business, and he’s there to appear on CNBC, where the suits deliver their sermons. But Ed Zitron has arrived at the broadcast desk in a charcoal gray T-shirt.

Right off the top, host Leslie Picker tests him. For years now, Zitron has been pointing out that while AI industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic might have huge valuations—and might soon stage giant initial public offerings (IPOs)—they don’t actually make much money.

“They wouldn’t be the first with bad financial profiles to go public,” Picker says, alluding to past young tech companies, like Uber, believed to have world-changing potential.

“They’d be the first to be this bad, other than WeWork,” Zitron swiftly replies over the din of the trading floor, citing the super start-up of a decade ago that raised ungodly sums from venture capitalists before imploding after a failed attempt to go public. “And even then, this is so much worse than that. OpenAI burned $20.9 billion in 2025.”

In recent months, this 40-year-old former tech publicist has been popping up on Bloomberg, CNBC, MS NOW, and all over financial YouTube in his increasingly trademark Zelenskyycore. When he arrives, the locals generally seem amazed at his command of the numbers and the logic beneath the biggest economic story of our time.

There’s been a broad consensus for three years now that large language models (LLMs), like Claude and ChatGPT, represent a technological revolution that will transform nearly every aspect of our lives—and, naturally, make a lot of money for the companies involved. As a result, investors have poured money into virtually any firm associated with these technologies. In stock-speak, it’s called “the AI trade.” There are dissidents, like Zitron or Michael Burry of Big Short fame, but they are few and far between in financial and tech media.

At the top of the AI pyramid, there’s Nvidia, making GPUs (graphics processing units, a kind of advanced microchip) that are installed in giant data centers. Those facilities are built and serviced by the businesses one level down in the pyramid: big-tech “hyperscalers,” like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Oracle, plus an array of “neoclouds,” such as CoreWeave and Nebius.

The data centers offer computing power (“compute”) that those firms rent to companies at the bottom of the pyramid—the ones closest to the consumer, like OpenAI and Anthropic. They use that compute to handle your prompt when you ask, “What color was George Washington’s white horse?”

That process of delivering your answer is called “inference,” and it’s measured in “tokens.” Each prompt uses a certain number of tokens. Complex requests—like coding—require a lot of tokens. The more tokens needed, the more money your prompt costs the company that runs your LLM. But most people using Claude or ChatGPT are paying a flat monthly fee, not a fee per token. For a company like Anthropic, that’s created a scenario allowing people to spend $200 for a month of Claude premium but use thousands of dollars worth of compute.

So there are some issues on the revenue side. What about the total costs of this revolution? How much has been spent on “the AI buildout” so far?

“Over $1 trillion now, easily,” Zitron tells me. “There are estimates that hyperscalers will spend another trillion next year. The reason I think these numbers get repeated like they’re normal is, they’re so unreal, we may as well be talking about unicorns or the legendary beast, the griffin.” Now many of these firms are taking on extraordinary levels of debt to cover their sprawling spending plans. Plus, there’s that whole thing with Chinese labs making much cheaper “open-source” models.

Six weeks after Zitron’s trip to the stock exchange, we’re sitting in a recording studio at the iHeartMedia offices in midtown Manhattan, where he often tapes his podcast, Better Offline. If Wall Street is a foreign land, then this is his home away from home. Born in west London, he’s based in Las Vegas after leaving the Bay Area, where he ran his own public relations firm. Now he’s launched a newsletter (Where’s Your Ed At) and the podcast, which Zitron says sees between 750,000 and 1 million downloads a month.

Today he’s hosting the writer Ed Ongweso Jr. and comedian Chloe Radcliffe for a discussion of the more existential stakes of our AI revolution. Zitron is freestyling, gesticulating significantly as he serves up fine-grained statistics with no notes and launches all manner of impish barbs at OpenAI chief Sam Altman and other AI leaders. There are some Briticisms too, plus the occasional apoplectic monologue as all the things he’s read about the business of AI come flowing into the mic like a river. His dark coif is unmoved even as he gets animated, the London accent crackling as he rails against what we’re told is the future.

Zitron was doing PR until earlier this year, but a while back he “started writing on the side because I was not doing well emotionally,” he says. “I was quite depressed for several years. I got way better. Tons of therapy. It’s awesome.” That’s how his new media business was born. Throughout 2023 and 2024, Zitron says, he watched the tech and financial media bear-hug LLMs and got curious. “Why is no one saying how much money they make from this?” he thought to himself. “They won’t stop talking about it, other than saying how much they’re making on it.” He’d never had much interest in AI before, but suddenly he was covering it all the time.

Then last year he realized his limitations. “I’m like, I can’t read this shit. So I just taught myself to read balance sheets and financials. And I’m really lucky that I have quite a few financial types who are very generous with their time—private equity guys, hedge fund guys who read my work and were like, ‘I’d love to get you the rest of the way.’” He grew as a writer and a broadcaster, “and it was quite an emotional journey for me,” he says. “It made me develop as a person. I realized this is what I wanted to do.”

By now, he’s brash, absolute, self-assured, and occasionally self-aggrandizing, but his expanding audience and busy interview schedule suggest a growing number of people seem to think he’s one of the few who understands what’s really going on.

“Right now Silicon Valley has such profound AI psychosis,” he tells me at a restaurant bar across the street from the studio, the postwork happy hour crowds beginning to build around us. “I think this might break venture capital and destroy large parts of it.”

Whatever you might think regarding the revolutionary potential of this technology, the companies involved are spending huge amounts of money but bringing relatively little in. This is historically a problem in business. In the Q&A below, edited for length and clarity, Zitron makes the case that this will soon be a problem for all of us.

[Q&A follows]

Hey all!

To celebrate a year of the premium edition of Where's Your Ed At, I'm having a one-week-long sale - $10 off the annual $70 subscription price *for life* until midnight on July 22. Thanks for reading and supporting my work.

https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/N9bqSLKBoS?ref=wheresyoured.at

As some of you may or may not know, the newsletter is now my primary source of income along with the podcast. Joining gets you a huge - 10k+ word - newsletter every week (though I'm taking a week off this one for the first time since December), and helps immensely. I email back and forth with basically every premium sub who contacts me at ez@betteroffline.com, and it's a direct way to support my free work too.

Anyway, time for a few days off, lol

Had a good interview with them a few weeks ago that just ran, the comments alone are hilarious, but one of my better interviews I'd say.

Joined the Tech Report to talk about how Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon buying AI GPUs is making memory - and everything else - more expensive in tech, turning them into asset-heavy, cashflow-negative behemoths thanks to their disastrous bets on AI.

Joined the tech report to talk about how Meta selling its compute - and NVIDIA continuing to pay to rent back its GPUs - are clear signs that we're overbuilding GPU capacity, and how that might go terribly wrong in the future.

Fun chat with Ed Elson about a subject that made me laugh so hard I made oinking noises.

I think it’s a tacit admission that Meta overbuilt capacity, and the bulls are trying to coming up with magical thoughts here.

Hello everyone,

It has been a very intense few weeks, somehow an acceleration of what's been a very intense few months, and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you that listen to the show, read my newsletter, or otherwise support my work. I get the sense many of you follow across YouTube videos and posts, which is equal parts terrifying and touching. I have worked tremendously hard the last few years and it makes it worth it to receive such a warm reception and continued support.

Absolutely no idea when this lets up, recording two great episodes (Polymarket with Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff from the WSJ, SoftBank's Incredible Goose Adventure with Trashfuture), an interview with Investor's Business Daily, and putting together both what is shaping up to be a great free newsletter and a very special Hater's Guide.

I fundamentally believe the AI industry is losing. Things are not working out how they need to, and everything I've been discussing for years is becoming clearer, and in tangible terms that connect directly to the work. There will be no cheap thrills in this one. We will be able to point to direct things said on this very Subreddit in the future as proof that we were far ahead.

I am extremely tired, and was just about to write "but it looks like things might slo-" but stopped myself before the jinxing. Who knows where this crap goes next. Either way, much more fun covering it with all of you involved, cheers!

-Ed