Ed Zitron

@edzitron on X

Writes about AI and Revenue. 63% of posts open with an observation. A typical post reaches 765 likes.

Remix their style

Posts: 49
Likes: 118K
Typical: 765
Best: 33K

What they write about

AI: 71%
Revenue: 49%

How they open

observation: 63%
number: 29%
announcement: 4%

Every post of theirs in the library

Ed Zitron@edzitron

I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

it's so funny that Musk deliberately pushed as much traffic to this video as possible, paying Mr. Beast $250k to say "it's a bit of a facade"

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Today's newsletter is the story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

"So you're a software company" "That's right Dave" "and you spent $500 million on AI tokens in a month?" "Yep" "and you're using AI to...replace employees?" "that's right" "that's more than your entire annual SG&A, isn't it?" "uhuh."

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Gotta admit, Meta being the force that starts scuppering Anthropic and OpenAI’s growth is a really funny way to wrap this up. Zuckerberg cannot build products to make his users happy, but he LOVES building stuff to kill off other companies

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

I don’t think people realize the ramifications of OpenAI’s revenue growth slowing. Oracle is building about $348bn in data centers and needs OpenAI to pay it $75bn a year in revenue to keep up with the costs. Ellison has bet everything on this. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

This is absolutely god damn ridiculous at this point. NVIDIA is effectively bailing out anyone in the AI industry as a means of inflating their valuations and keeping them buying compute. Sorry, perplexity is not worth $30 billion in anything other than the circularverse

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

I feel like we should all be a little concerned/outraged that there was allegedly a $1 billion transaction between two parties that just *didn't happen* despite multiple stories (and even a deep dive "about how the deal came together) saying otherwise? Disney saw a stock bump!

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Anthropic to spend $45 billion it doesn’t have on chips that haven’t been shipped to a company (Nscale) that has yet to start building the data center to put them in so it can take the contract and use it to raise money to do it, all to pump its IPO.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

meta considered firing a bunch of people and replacing them with AI but didn't because it wouldn't remotely work! Feels like a huge story, and makes me wonder what the people talking about "Zuck's AI assistant" or "Meta's agents" were huffing

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Okay so now instead of theoretically backstopping $250 billion NVIDIA would theoretically backstop $120 billion in a deal that is yet to be finalized for a data center that has yet to be built by a company that has never built a data center for a company that can't afford to pay

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

OpenAI is washed. Revenue grew from $5.7bn in q1 to $6.7bn in Q2, and the operating margin got worse, though for whatever reason the journal didn’t disclose what it was or how much worse it was. Last quarter it was (non-GAAP) negative 122% for some context

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

This is really bad. Amazon spent $52bn (normalized for inflation) in capex between 2002 and 2017 to create one of the single-most profitable businesses in the world. Now it's spending $300bn+ with 75%+ of that revenue coming from Anthropic, who it's fed $13bn+ to keep alive.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Is this circular financing? No! It’s just us helping our partners raise billions in debt and us backstopping 25% of the deal for customers so then they can then buy our GPUs. If anything it’s spherical

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Anthropic loosening rate limits across the board by renting the entirety of Musk's Colossus-1 data center. Not really sure what the business strategy is here giving away $8-$13.50 for every $1 of sub revenue. Very funny. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

OpenAI was told to delay its IPO by advisors because it couldn't get a $1 trillion valuation but Anthropic is looking for $2 trillion + to raise $100bn, at this point I think there's a real chance that Sammy can't make this thing float. Dumber shit has happened of course

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

$5 billion TO DATE? This heavily suggests that Anthropic? Over $10 billion in inference and training costs? This heavily suggests that almost every story about Anthropic’s revenue and costs they’ve leaked is wrong and that it’s been misleading the media.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

I can't get over this interview from The Verge with Sundar Pichai - he made Google integrate generative AI into search despite hallucinations being "unsolved," because it makes them "very creative." I don't want Google to be creative!!! I NEED AN ANSWER!!! t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

this is *insane*. NVIDIA's CFO literally said on the call last night that this was a way that NVIDIA would "get paid twice," despite having discontinued the program a week beforehand. They're denying this report, but I trust Anissa's reporting far more than Colette kress

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are considering price cuts. Neither of these companies but ESPECIALLY OpenAI can under any circumstances afford this pay cut. This is fundamentally insane. A sign of desperation that will erode revenue while costs stay linear. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Who cares. Your company lost $5.2bn in 2025! Work out the problems that actually exist versus writing fan fiction. And spare me the “oh it’s good to have these discussions,” amodei is doing this to intentionally make people think Anthropic is “making AGI”

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

i have become obsessed with how bad the Rabbit R1 is. The Doordash demo they did in front of a crowd for the launch was so unbelievably broken, didn't work on the first try and then took forever on the second. The Large Action Model is a CON! t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

coreweave shareholders got diluted by 4.5% or so in this deal. They magicked up another 22 million shares and sold them to NVIDIA. Very nice stuff, very nice, this is what you do when things are going "great"

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Congratulations on google for making $62.5* billion in net income! *$36.9 billion came from gains in the value of equity, I assume in Anthropic.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

i cannot believe how rarely people ask the simple question of "how do they pay for this?" Anthropic lost $5.2bn *after* $4.5bn of revenue in 2025! They're feeding equity to opex again and again, this is literally a test of whether venture capital can keep it alive

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Looks like Fable 5 will be available on subscriptions until June 23, at which point it'll be token-based billing. The era of subsidized AI is coming to an end!

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

folks we're doing vendor financing, quite frankly, we're doing some of the greatest vendor financing we've ever seen, the chips are so good that we're having to loan the chips to the customer and also pay to rent them back, it's simply tremendous - can you believe it?

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Sam Altman is talking about bringing online "tens of thousands" and then "Hundreds of thousands" of GPUs. 10,000 GPUs costs them $113 million a year, 100k $1.13bn, so this is Sam Altman committing to billions of dollars to an expensive model that lacks any real new use cases.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

so OpenAI hit $40 billion in run rate (so like $3bn in monthly revenue) months after Anthropic did, mysteriously dropping the same day that its CRO left and Anthropic had a story in the FT pumping its IPO. Revenue growth definitely slowing

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Suicide round btw. How do you raise past this? Also, why only give $10bn up front? Why is the rest "by the end of the year" if SoftBank is so confident? OpenAI anticipates to spend $13bn on MS' compute in 2025. How do they afford to?

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Lambda (NVDA investment, $1.4bn contract) signing a deal with NVIDIA, so Anthropic (who lacks the credit to sign I assume?) can maybe rent back capacity that is leased in NVIDIA's name, built by Hut8, who is also building capacity with Fluidstack. Every bad sign possible lol

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Satya Nadella has sunk over $300bn in capex and $13bn+ in equity investments into AI and all he has to show for it is an (at best) $7.2bn a year add-on business to M365, GitHub Copilot (neutered with Token-based billing) and Azure AI revenue that's around 70% OpenAI's compute

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

God damn, I hate Perplexity. There is a huge difference between "sharing a link to a story with a quote" and "wholesale ripping off multiple articles and then presenting their findings as your own in a way that deprives the publisher of any real traffic, credit or revenue"

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Amazon is talking about investing $10bn in OpenAI so that OpenAI can then hand some of that back as part of its $38bn cloud compute deal using trainium chips. This should get OpenAI to what, March? Does all of this get sent back to Amazon? How weird. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

This is *wild* - this isn't xAI using Anthropic directly, but a product that uses Anthropic's models. It directly hurts Cursor (one of Anthropic's largest API customers) and also shows that any customer who competes with Anthropic will face the same.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

News: Anthropic seems to have removed access to Claude Code for its $20-a-month Pro Plans in another cost-cutting move. Some users still report having access, but documents reflect only Max users having access to Claude Code with their subscription. t.co

News: Anthropic Removes Claude Code From $20-A-Month "Pro" Subscription Plan For New Users (Developing)
Ed Zitron
Apr 21, 2026
2 min read
Executive Summary:
Anthropic appears to have removed access to Claude Code for its $20-a-month "Pro" Plans.
Current Pro users appear to still have access via the Claude web app.
Claude Code support documents exclusively refer to accessing Claude Code via "your Max Plan," after previously saying you could access "with your Pro or Max Plan."
In developing news, Anthropic appears to have removed access to AI coding tool Claude Code from its $20-a-month "Pro" accounts. This is likely another cost-cutting move that follows a recent change (per The Information) that forced enterprise users to pay on a per-million-token based rate rather than having rate limits that were, based on researchers' findings, often much higher than the cost of the subscription.

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Cursor made “roughly” $770m in revenue in 2025 and lost “nearly” $900 million. Yet it raised over $3 billion that period and needed another $2 billion before the spacex acquisition. Something doesn’t add up!

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

I take it back this guy rocks. Huge grifter who saw the opportunity of AI then got kicked out when everybody realised it wasn't a business and told people he was a secret agent, the classic thing that secret agents love to do

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Now Stability Ai's ceo is quitting after a staff exodus over his failure to commercialise. Stability burns $8m a month as of October 2023. OpenAI probably escaped this by getting "funding" from Microsoft in cloud credits, though I bet it still burns cash t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

This company raised at an $850m valuation and they will probably sell for like $80m. Maybe less. What would an acquirer buy? A horrible device that nobody wants that barely works run by a management consultant and a guy who was a designer at Apple 7 years ago?

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Yeah I dunno how one can see this as bullish. xAi’s compute demands are so small that it can spare 300MW to a competitor and handle inference using Oracle (who musk explicitly jilted to build Colossus-1). Practically speaking, how much other demand is there?

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

What a peculiar article! Says 112m paid subs at the $5-a-month tier up from *THREE MILLION* in 2025, but also $20-a-month subscribers will decrease by *80%* from 44M to 9m in 2026? I dunno this reads to me like OpenAI is churning its $20-a-month subs! t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

SB Energy S-1 is an absolute dog, $439bn backlog, only $1 billion of which will be recognized in the next *two years*, and $351 billion of which will take longer than 4 to 8 years to pull in. Safe to assume mostly from OpenAI's Ohio and Miami deals. t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

As @kakashiii111 said - why does NVIDIA need to put down a $150m deposit? Meta has the money too! This is so utterly peculiar

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

So this whole "80% of databases are being built by AI agents" is interesting, in that it's all from Databricks' acquisition of Neon in May 2025 - and hasn't changed since June 2025. This is an egregious overstatement! t.co t.co

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

perhaps this is a little cynical of me but i really think all of these hires are symbolic, built for people that don't understand what it is OpenAI sells. They don't care about responsible AI, otherwise their training data wouldn't involve outright theft

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

This is the first time that Google has missed on search revenue since Q4 2023. EPS was also boosted by $6.26 by unrealized gain on securities (SpaveX), actual EPS would be around $2.85, it rocks that these companies do this lol

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

there is no actual proof that Google's capex is contributing much to revenue growth. The Information reported 8m enterprise licenses for Gemini, and Google Cloud was $11.9bn for the quarter. Google didn't report any actual growth in search from AI. Utter madness

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Ed Zitron@edzitron

Google's generative search is going to cut 25% to 60%of search traffic to media outlets, replacing it with Google's own generative answers. Search engines want to be the new ISPs. I bet they let you pay to be more prominent. This could make a whole new kind of awful seo

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