Hey all,
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I have a lot of trouble giving myself credit for anything, and genuinely think I could be doing more or that I "didn't do that much" because I'm at a computer or on a microphone versus serving customers in person or something or rather.
To try and give some sort of scale to the work from the last year, I've written down the highlights. It appears that 2025 was an insane year for me.
Here's the rundown:
- Cory Doctorow quoted me at the very front of his new book.
- I recorded over 110 episodes of my tech podcast Better Offline, starting with a 13.5 hour-long pop-up radio show at CES 2025. And yes, it's back next week, featuring David Roth, Adam Conover, Ed Ongweso Jr., Chloe Radcliffe, Robert Evans, Gare Davis, Cory Doctorow and a host of other great guests.
- Better Offline also won the Webby for best business podcast episode for last year's episode The Man That Destroyed Google Search.
- I also had some fantastic interviews, like when I went out to North Carolina to interview Steve Burke of GamersNexus, chatted to author Adam Becker about the technoligarchs, Pablo Torres and David Roth about independent media, and even comedian Andy Richter.
- I wrote over 440,000 words, not including the work I've done on the book or any notes I took to prepare for my show or newsletter.
- The newsletter also grew from 47,000~ish people at the end of last year to around 88,500 people. I want to be at 150,000 this time next year.
- I wrote some of my favourite free newsletters (many of which were turned into episodes of the show):
- Deep Impact, my analysis of the DeepSeek situation and why it scared the American AI industry (clue: it's cost-related and nothing to do with "national security").
- Power Cut, an early warning sign that the bubble was bursting as Microsoft pulled out of gigawatts of data center deals.
- CoreWeave Is A Time Bomb, published March 17 2025, way before most had even bothered to think about this company deeply, a savage analysis of a "neocloud" - a company that only sells AI compute - backed by NVIDIA, who is also a customer, who CoreWeave also buys billions of GPUs from.
- The Era of the Business Idiot, probably my favourite piece I wrote this year, the story of how middle management has seized power, breeding out true meritocracy and value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence. It ties together everything I've ever written.
- Make Fun Of Them, the piece that restarted my fire after a bit of a low point, where I call for a radical new approach to tech CEOs: mocking them, because they talk like idiots and provide little value to society outside of their dedication to shareholder value.
- The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble, a piece that elevated me in a way that I never expected, a thorough and brutal broadside against an industry that has no profits and terrible costs, discussing how generative AI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable generative AI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs.
- AI Is A Money Trap, a piece about how AI companies' ridiculous valuations and unsustainable businesses make exits or IPOs impossible, how data center developers have no exit route, and US economic growth has become shouldered entirely by big tech.
- How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future.
- The Case Against Generative AI, a comprehensive analysis of a financial collapse built on myths, the markets’ unhealthy obsession with NVIDIA's growth, and the fact that there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI.
- NVIDIA Isn't Enron, So What Is It? - A lighthearted and indepth analysis of NVIDIA as a company, a historic rundown of what happened with Lucent, WorldCom and Enron, as well as a guide to how it makes money, how its future relies on endless debt, how millions of GPUs are sitting waiting to be installed, and why it no longer makes sense to buy more GPUs.
- The Enshittifinancial Crisis, a piece about The Enshittifinancial Crisis, the fourth stage of enshittification, where companies turn on their shareholders. Unprofitable, unsustainable AI threatens future of venture capital, private equity and the markets themselves.
- I published two massive exclusives:
- How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services, which is exactly what it sounds like.
- How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft, which also includes evidence that OpenAI's revenues were at around $4.5 billion by the end of September, a vast difference from the $4.3 billion for the first half of the year published by other outlets. The Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch covered, while others aggressively ignored it.
- I launched the premium edition of my newsletter, and published multiple deeply important pieces of research:
- The Hater's Guide to NVIDIA, the single-most exhaustive rundown of the rickety nature of the company sitting at the top of the stock market – how its future is dependent on massive debt, how AI revenues will never pay back the cost of these GPUs, and how there are likely millions of GPUs sitting in warehouses, as there's no chance that 6 million Blackwell GPUs have actually been installed and turned on. Published November 24 2025, I made this call several weeks before famed short seller Michael Burry would do the same.
- How Does GPT-5 Work? - an exclusive piece (reported using internal documents from an infrastructure provider) on how GPT-5's router mode actually costs OpenAI more money to run.
- OpenAI Burned $4.1 Billion More Than We Knew - Where Is Its Money Going? - an analysis of reported cash burn and investments in OpenAI that proved the company burned more than $4 billion more than we know.
- OpenAI and Oracle Are Full of Crap - on September 12 2025, months before anybody started worrying about it, I published proof that OpenAI couldn't afford to pay Oracle and Oracle didn't have the capacity to service their farcical $300 billion, 5-year-long deal.
- OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years - on September 26 2025, I published a thorough review and analysis of OpenAI's agreed-upon compute and data center deals, and proved that it needed at least $1 trillion in the next four years to pull any of it off, several weeks before anyone else did.
- The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2: a massive omnibus summary of every major AI company's weaknesses - the pathetic revenues, terrible margins and horrifying costs, and how hopeless everything feels.
I also did no less than 50 different interviews, with highlights including:
- My own interview in the New Yorker's legendary "Talk Of The Town" section.
- Profiles with Slate, the Financial Times and FastCompany.
- An interview with MarketWatch about The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble.
- A panel in Seattle with Cory Doctorow about Enshittification and The Rot Economy.
- A chat with Brooke Gladstone on NPR about the AI bubble.
- Two interviews with the BBC.
- An interview with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay on The Ringer's Higher Learning.
- Two episodes of Chapo Trap House.
- Interviews with The Lever, Parker Molloy's The Present Age, Bloomberg's Everybody's Business, The Majority Report, Newsweek's 1600 Podcast, TechCrunch, Defector, the New Yorker (by the legendary Cal Newport), Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People, both Slate's Death, Sex & Money and the excellent TBD podcast, TrashFuture multiple times, The Times Radio (I think multiple times?) and NPR Marketplace.
- Citations in an astonishing amount of major media outlets, with highlights including The Economist, The Guardian, Charlie Brooker (!) in The Hollywood Reporter, ArsTechnica, CNN, Semafor and ZDNet
Next year I will be finishing up my book Why Everything Stopped Working (due out in 2027), and continuing to dig into the nightmare of corporate finance I've found myself in the center of.
I have no idea what happens next. My fear - and expectation - is that many people still do not realize that there is an AI bubble or will not accept how significant and dangerous the bubble is, meaning that everybody is going to act like AI is the biggest most hugest and most special thing in the world right up until they accept that it isn't.
I will always cover tech, but I get the sense I'll be looking into other things next year - private equity, for one - that have caught my eye toward the end of the year.
I realize right now everything feels a little intense and bleak, but at this time of year it's always worth remembering to be kinder and more thoughtful toward those close to us. It's cheesy, but it's the best thing you can possibly do. It's easy to feel isolated by the amount of hogs oinking at the prospect of laying you off or replacing you - and it turns out there are far more people that are afraid or outraged than there are executives or AI boosters.
Never forget (or forgive them for) what they've done to the computer, and never forget that those scorned by the AI bubble are legion. Join me on r/Betteroffline, you are far from alone.
I intend to spend the next year becoming a better writer, analyst, broadcaster, entertainer and person. I appreciate every single one of you that reads my work, and hope you'll continue to do so in the future.
See you in 2026,
Ed Zitron
ez@betteroffline.com
