The passing of Om Malik
We've lots one of my earliest blogging idols, just when we need him most
When you’re flicking through your RSS reader, this is not the sort of thing you want to see:
Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.
I didn’t really know Om, but I’ve been reading him for the best part of a quarter of a century. I've regularly linked to his work from here. His original blog, GigaOm was one of the first blogs I followed regularly, and early in my blogging career, a link from him was one of the first taste I had of how much traffic a power blogger could send.
And that wasn’t even his main blog, it was a side-project that he ran for the non-resident Indian community, linking to a photo post of mine that featured an (attractive) NRI woman. We had a brief email exchange after that. And never communicated again.
But I kept on reading him, happy to know that he was, sometimes at least, reading me too. And in the decades since, he remained a consistent voice, finding the narrow path between tech boosterism and tech cynicism. He’s precisely the sort of voice we need in the midst of the AI shift – and we’ve lost him.
I’ll leave more detailed celebrations of the man to those who knew him better (I’ve linked to a couple below), but my reading time will be so much poorer for the lack of his insights.
Thank you, and rest in peace.
Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.
Some of my best memories are sitting with Om at a conference or at the Indian place he loved, or on one of our trips to Amsterdam or London for conferences, and talking about what was happening in tech and who was worth watching or listening to. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he knew everyone — and he knew where a lot of the bodies were buried, and who was just a lot of hot air in a suit jacket, and he was not afraid to say so (longtime friend Matt Mullenweg says he wants to organize an OmFest to celebrate Om).
