Ed Zitron interview with Steven Bartlett
Ed Zitron founded a tech PR agency in 2013 and has spent 13 years getting paid to make tech companies look good to reporters. A trade list of the top 50 PR people in tech has named Ed Zitron four separate times. In June, Ed Zitron obtained OpenAI's audited financial statements and published them. He sat down with Steven Bartlett and stated: 'I think generative AI is at its heart a con.' OpenAI booked $13.07 billion of revenue in 2025 but spent $34 billion getting that revenue. The operating loss came to $20.92 billion. Research and development cost $19.18 billion. That R&D cost was more than the company's entire revenue. The filings show OpenAI paid Microsoft $17.2 billion last year while Microsoft paid OpenAI $303 million back. You have never once paid what any of this actually costs. SemiAnalysis bought every subscription tier OpenAI and Anthropic sell and ran coding tasks until weekly limits died. A $200 ChatGPT Pro plan absorbed $14,000 worth of tokens at list API prices. Claude Max absorbed $8,000 worth of tokens at list API prices. OpenAI starts losing money on a Plus subscriber the moment that person uses 11.4% of what they're allowed. Uber burned through its ENTIRE annual AI budget by April. Andrew Macdonald is Uber's President and COO. He said the costs were getting hard to justify. Engineers there are now capped at $1,500 a month per coding tool. That's one of the most sophisticated technology companies on Earth putting its own staff on a leash. Nvidia holds equity in CoreWeave and sells CoreWeave the chips. Nvidia signed a backstop with an initial value of $6.3 billion. CoreWeave's own filing shows when its data center capacity isn't fully used by its own customers, Nvidia is OBLIGATED to buy the unsold capacity. That obligation runs through April 2032. So Nvidia sells the GPUs, funds the buyer, and guarantees the demand. Then CoreWeave walks into a bank holding a signed customer contract and borrows against it. If you want to build a profitable business, a bank tells you to get lost. If you want to buy GPUs, it's open season. Anthropic complicates his case. The company is running at a $47 billion revenue run rate and projected an operating profit for the second quarter of this year. Amazon lost money for over a decade before AWS turned. Hundreds of millions of people use these products daily and that adoption isn't fake. Zitron says the difference is the size of the hole. Amazon burned $29.7 billion across 12 years. OpenAI burned $21 billion in 12 MONTHS and has pledged roughly $600 billion toward infrastructure through 2030. Asked what would change his mind, he said a hardware breakthrough that cuts the cost by a thousand. Nobody has one. So this ends in a crash that takes ordinary retirement accounts down with it. The companies that own those revealing numbers won't publish them at all. Only one of those two is hiding something. And most retirement money in America is already indexed to the companies doing the hiding. This won't end well.
