Daring Fireball

John Gruber started Daring Fireball a few months after leaving Bare Bones Software, as a columnist-style weblog.⁠[1]

The site’s look has barely changed since its founding in 2002, and when it turned ten in August 2012 none of its URLs had ever changed.⁠[2][3]

Gruber launched a two-week membership drive: readers could buy a $30.72 T-shirt or donate $20.48 or more for a one-year membership that included a full-content RSS feed, while the site itself stayed free. He said he wanted Daring Fireball to be his real work.⁠[4]

According to Gruber, he began writing Daring Fireball full-time after leaving Joyent in March 2006.⁠[1]

Since 2007 Gruber has released The Talk Show podcast almost weekly. In May 2012 the show moved from the 5by5 network to the Mule Radio Syndicate.⁠[2][5]

The site relies mainly on sponsorship: a sponsorship initially cost only $500, and by 2016 the listed price had reached $8,000; SimilarWeb data put its traffic at more than 1.6 million visits a month over the preceding two years.⁠[2]

The site published Gruber’s article “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino,” criticizing Apple for advertising personalized Siri features it had never demonstrated.⁠[6]

Episode 449 of The Talk Show was recorded before a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose, with guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel.⁠[7]

The site published Gruber’s article “X Once Again Marks the Spot,” in which he argued that X has regained its footing under Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s ownership and that he sees more interesting posts there than on ThreadsThreadsThreads is a text-sharing social app from Meta built by the Instagram team; launched on July 5, 2023, it lets users log in with their Instagram account and has gradually connected to the fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, and in June 2026 Meta announced it had reached 500 million monthly active users.Open the full entry, Bluesky and Mastodon combined, with discussions of AI tools less likely to turn into arguments.⁠[8]

The site is written and produced by Gruber, with copyright held by The Daring Fireball Company LLC; articles are still published through Movable Type and the site is hosted by Linode.⁠[9]

The site takes one exclusive sponsor per week at a listed price of $12,000, which includes a sponsor post in the RSS feed at the start of the week, a sidebar display ad on every page and a thank-you link at week’s end.⁠[10]

The Talk Show now runs under Daring Fireball, with its latest episode, No. 455, released on September 25, 2026.⁠[11]

Daring Fireball: Official website: https://daringfireball.net/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

X: Official account: https://x.com/daringfireball (opens in a new window)⁠[8]