Ed Zitron is not a journalist, not a whistleblower and certainly not a prophet. He’s not here to spread conspiracies, to “tell it like it is” or to convince you that he knows the truth and that everybody else is a moron. He is, he says, just a pissed off, emotional guy who needs to get “these fucking words out of my head”.
Listeners to Zitron’s podcast, Better Offline, or readers of his blog, “Where’s your Ed at”, are used to the swearing but might scoff at his protests. Zitron’s sneering manifestos — delivered with the dropped Ts of his London accent and a furious rhythm that veers from performance to polemic — take aim at the “idiots”, “conmen” and cynical tech billionaires he believes are responsible for a “rotten” economy, and they have earned him a viral following.
Take the blog he publishes as I board a plane to Las Vegas to meet him for this interview. A 13,000-word screed about the “era of the business idiot”, it is written with an apostate’s disaffection, and argues that modern companies, especially those in the tech industry, are no longer run by competent people, but by greedy fools who have risen through a broken system that rewards superficial action over substance. It opens by calling Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, the second largest public company in the world, “either a liar or a specific kind of idiot” for comments Nadella made in an interview about the sorts of questions he asks his company’s own AI chatbot.