THE MANY SIDES OF Ed Zitron

He's one of the loudest voices of the Al haters-even as he does PR for Al companies. Either way, the multi-platform British tech writer has your attention.

- By Tommy Craggs Photographs by Ali Cherkis

IN his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a “chunderfuck.”

“And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. “I work with founders all the time. I’m a founder myself, I guess—I don’t like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year—and everyone's celebrating them? It's offensive.”

We were talking about whether any of Zitron's ranting about the Al industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. He said no. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. “I said, ‘I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn’t about you,’” Zitron told me. “His company is burning billions of dollars. He’s a terrible businessman.”