Stephen Witt

Stephen Witt is an American journalist and author whose work explores the intersection of technology, culture, and economic upheaval. He is best known for his 2015 book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, a widely acclaimed investigation into how digital file sharing dismantled the recorded music industry. That book was named one of the year's best by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, NPR, Rolling Stone, and Billboard, won the Marfield Prize for the best work of nonfiction about the arts, and was a Library Journal book of the year. Witt holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in economics and mathematics and a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He has worked as an emerging-markets investment analyst and has contributed long-form reporting to The New Yorker, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. His reporting has tended to focus on the human stories embedded inside technological and economic transformations — the people whose decisions, friendships, and obsessions shape the developments that the rest of us experience as inevitable. The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip, published in 2025 by Viking, was the product of extended access to Huang and his inner circle and has been widely reviewed as one of the definitive contemporary accounts of how the modern AI economy came to be. He lives in Los Angeles.