Tech journalist and GigaOm founder Om Malik dies at 60

Om Malik, the journalist who turned a blog into one of the most-read voices in technology, has died. He passed away on June 24 at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart, surrounded by family and friends. He was 60.

Malik’s career began far from the valley he came to define. He was a senior writer at Forbes in the early 1990s, eventually joining the founding team behind the publication’s website. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2000 to write for Business 2.0, before striking out on his own a year later.

That solo venture became GigaOm, founded in 2001 and built into one of the defining technology-news outlets of the dot-com and post-dot-com eras, read by hundreds of thousands every month. Malik stepped away from day-to-day operations in 2014, and the company ceased operations the following year after it could not pay its creditors, with the assets eventually bought and relaunched by Knowingly.

From there, Malik pivoted to venture capital, joining True Ventures, where he stayed for the best part of two decades. He was the first founder the firm ever backed, and was later appointed partner emeritus in 2022. The firm’s tribute called him “brilliant, thoughtful, humorous, profoundly kind, and deeply curious,” adding that he “never shied away from sharing his views or pushing for the truth.”

Even in retirement from the daily grind, Malik never stopped writing or thinking out loud. He kept a personal blog, ran a newsletter called Crazy Stupid Tech with the journalist Fred Vogelstein, and built a following of over a million on X, where his commentary on the excesses and absurdities of the industry remained as sharp as ever.

Tributes arrived swiftly from across the industry he spent a lifetime covering. Apple’s Greg Joswiak remembered an “incredibly talented and thoughtful person who understood technology deeply, and who always saw it through a human lens.” Salesforce’s Marc Benioff called him “a pioneer, a deep thinker, and a truly original voice who shaped the soul of Silicon Valley.” Bloomberg’s Emily Chang said he taught her not just to cover companies, but to understand the people behind them, question the hype, and never lose sight of the bigger picture. Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid pointed to the quieter, lasting impact: advice, encouragement and friendship that shaped founders and investors across the ecosystem for years.

Malik’s health troubles ran deeper and longer than most knew. He suffered a heart attack in his early forties and later managed type 2 diabetes, overhauling his diet and habits in an effort to outrun a body that kept fighting back. He mostly succeeded, for a good while.

One of his final public notes was a swipe at lazy tech coverage and a nod to those willing to say the uncomfortable thing. “The madness is about the math that does not make sense,” he wrote of the industry’s AI spending spree. “AI is inevitable. So is math madness.” Vintage Malik: curious, sceptical, and never afraid to puncture the hype machine he had spent a career chronicling. Silicon Valley has lost one of the few people who could see straight through it.