When Om Malik arrived in New York in 1993, one of his first jobs was selling suitcases near Yankee Stadium. Eight years later he started a personal blog about broadband and telecoms called GigaOm. It became one of the first technology blogs that the industry read, and the trade press followed.
Malik died on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital in California. “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,” his family wrote on his website, under the heading “Om Malik, 1966-2026”. He had been in intensive care since April and was in need of a heart transplant.
Born on September 29, 1966, he was 59. Several outlets reported his age as 60.
From Delhi to New York
Malik was born in New Delhi. His father was an officer in the Indian Army and his mother taught Sanskrit at a high school. He graduated from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, in 1986 with an honours degree in chemistry. He went into the news business instead, starting as a typesetter and then writing lifestyle features, before working in London and Eastern Europe.
In New York, after the suitcase job, he found reporting work at India Abroad and later at Forbes. In 1994 he was among the co-founders of the South Asian Journalists Association.
The early web
In 1997 Malik was part of the founding team of Forbes.com as a senior editor. He then wrote about telecommunications for Red Herring and, after a brief spell as an investment manager at Hambrecht & Quist in 1999, joined Business 2.0 in San Francisco, where he stayed until 2006.
His 2003 book, Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist, covered the collapse of the telecom boom he had reported on.
GigaOm
The blog he started in 2001 became a company in 2006. That July, GigaOm published one of the earliest profiles of a new service called Twitter. Between 2008 and 2010 it raised more than $12 million, including a $6 million round that valued the business at more than $40 million. It bought the media news site PaidContent and grew to more than 500,000 monthly readers.
In December 2007, at 41, Malik had a heart attack. Accounts of his life have linked it to years of smoking cigars and cigarettes, drinking and eating badly.
He stepped back from GigaOm in 2014. In March 2015 the company stopped operating without warning, and two months later what remained was bought by the Knowingly Corporation.
Investor and photographer
By then Malik had moved to the other side of the table, as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures in Palo Alto. He kept writing, for The New Yorker, Fast Company and Wired, on his own site and in the newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech with Fred Vogelstein. He had more than a million followers on X, and his last posts there were arguments about cloud computing and spending on AI.
He also took photography seriously. He shot with Leica cameras and sold prints of his work, and his family’s statement points readers to them. He collected watches and fountain pens, wrote in Japanese notebooks and followed the New York Yankees.
He never married and had no children.
He spent his last years on the investing side, but he was still filing on X near the end.