“I love arguing with people in it people I have no interest in an actual civilized debate with I always love to go for the least mature thing [such as] nice ears dickhead even if they have normal sized ears.” Ed Zitron (Scumbag Podcast Ep 5, 36:19)
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Ed Zitron is a grifter who has spent his whole life spitting venom at people he does not know, so the little weasel can feel good behind his keyboard. The quote above comes from a whole podcast series he did with a pal on how they enrage people on the internet for joy.
Recently his playbook has been the populist’s, to the letter.
Lucky he has plenty of previous before he put his new mask on.
That pretence of virtue has let him spend the last 2.5 years hurling vicious personal abuse at anyone involved in artificial intelligence.
This year to date he has mustered 270 personal insults to luminaries of business, 65 different victims. I haven’t looked across other platforms.
With no background whatsoever on the industry, he immediately began advising his readers that doom was imminent and to stay safe.
Had he gone short an AI ETF in early 2024, as 557,000 words and dozens of podcasts advised, he would be in serious trouble. Had he gone long, he would be up 200%.
Worse, his utter certainty and depth of writing likely convinced many of his hundred-thousand followers to come out the markets denuding their savings and retirements under the illusion of expertise but driven merely by a thirst for attention.
He attributes the inaccuracy not to him of course, but that it ar proves the desperation
From his latest column, 25 August:
“The fact that everybody is finally starting to see my way is almost a relief.” (The AI Hater’s Manifesto)
Populists always capture a throng of simpletons, of course.
But to have called the prospects of AI negative, every week, for two and a half years, is to have been about as wrong as it is possible to be about anything.
He does, however, have the playbook.`
The Populist Recipe
Declare the elite crooked villains.
Place yourself as champion of the good folk they are cheating.
Describe your motives as chivalric and noble.
Make nasty personal attacks, certain that the targets are on the dark side.
Never concede a point. Every turn of events is further proof that the elite are scared and you are right.
Constructed well, you can never lose. The further your apocalypse recedes into the future, the greater the danger you announce. The more evil and criminal your opponents, the greater your licence to insult them in the most vicious terms, and anyone who stands on their side of the line with them.
Always remembering to burnish the shield of virtue:
“Altman, Amodei, Nadella, and the many, many other villains that I’ve mentioned in these pages - are bad people, and their values are the antithesis of my values. I care about people, and humanity, and truth, and they do not.” (The Revenge of the Business Idiot)
The man who cares about people and humanity produced, by my count, 497 personal insults against 112 named human beings between January 2025 and June 2026, against 78 kind words, 24 of which were thanking his own staff. That is not a lapse. That is the recipe. It took him some years to perfect it, so let us start at the beginning.
Academic Failure
Mr Zitron went to Latymer Upper, an exclusive London private school famous for two things.
First, it is often the top school in the nation for exam results.
Second, my school used to play them at cricket, and in 1994 I took 4 for 9, sweeping through their middle order. Career-best figures, and the only time (so far?) I have put in a match-winner.
I can tell you with total confidence that boys like Mr Zitron did not play cricket. He would have had a note to get out of it. Verruca.
Mr Zitron used that supremely privileged platform to go and read Meeja at Aberystwyth. For readers outside Britain: he could not have done worse. Mr Zitron blamed his school, which he says was dedicated “to leaving any child behind that wasn’t an easy A”.
Yet he writes every column from the condescending vantage of being cleverer than everyone he writes about. Dario Amodei, physics at Caltech and Stanford, a doctorate from Princeton, founder of the fastest-growing company of all time, is “one of the most annoying, vacuous, bloviating fuckwits in tech history”. Satya Nadella is “a verbose dullard”. The executive class as a whole are “Business Idiots”. From Meeja at Aberystwyth.
A Public Defrocking
Before Mr Zitron took up the mantle of fighting the greedy elites, he beat the odds and won an extremely sought-after position in the video game review trade. Well, his family connections did.
A small Greek studio, Aventurine, had spent years on its first game. Mr Zitron, writing for Eurogamer, the most influential review site in Britain at the time, gave it 2 out of 10, laced with the trademark smug insults:
“any attempt to glean joy from this torrid husk of an entertainment product is met with disdain”
Imagine reading that in the biggest European market. They would have been crushed. But the review seemed a bit off, so the developer checked the server logs. Two press accounts: one used for about 3 minutes, the other for under 2 hours across 13 sessions, most of it in the character creator, trying on outfits.
We were all 23 once. Ran out of time? Wouldn’t you just put in the generics and give it 8 out of 10?
No. This nepo-baby gave no thought to how it might land on the people who made the thing, writing joyfully:
“every little thing Darkfall does is tragic”
You can hear him guffaw at the contrast with the song lyric. Every little thing she does is magic.
It caused quite a scandal. Hundreds of comments and complaints; a second review was commissioned. Mr Zitron never wrote for Eurogamer again. So the game-reviewing career was not looking as promising as before, and where does an Englishman go when he has a reputation for being a charlatan?
America, of course.
Scumbag, By His Own Account
In New York he went into public relations. Forbes recorded in 2013 that he had been fired from his last job with “an ornery, combative disposition around those he didn’t respect” and that he “does not work well with others”. In 2016, some years before putting on the mask of virtue, he co-presented a poorly received podcast called, by his own choice, The Scumbag. Not many listened, but that did not stop him going for 25 episodes in which the hosts sat down and broadly discussed what bastards they were. Here are some choice tactics Mr Zitron disclosed on how he operates:
“my goal is not money or respect or to do things that I love it’s really just to like get make a bunch of guys get naked at their computers cuz they’re mad at me” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 3, 29:22)
“I always say like stupid shit like if someone like has psychologist in a bio I go like you’re not a psychologist you didn’t even go to college” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 5, 34:55)
“I have no idea how I’ve survived in Silicon Valley just fucking insulting people ... things have worked better for me like the ruder that I’ve been.” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 10, 2:14:33)
“I love arguing with people in it people I have no interest in an actual civilized debate with I always love to go for the least mature thing [such as] nice ears dickhead even if they have normal sized ears.” (Scumbag Podcast Ep 5, 36:19)
He told Vice at the time that reading things he hated was “enjoyable in a powerful way”, and that mocking lovelorn strangers had become “a little cruel and condescending (and hypocritical, as I’ve called people out a lot for punching down)”. He knew. He carried on.
The Populist Finds His Cause
Part Two Coming.
More Gold on the Grifter
Just gotta right it up better. Just hard to believe is on all these shows - nobody bothers to google him and see he has zero work experience or training in
Finance
Accounting
GPUs
Geo-Politcs
LLMs
If anyone who know a jiff about finance can see he is well out of his deptj//