Zed is co-founded by one (or more?) original developer of Atom. So, it's a successor in a sense that it is a new project by the same author.
Atom was developed at GitHub, and GitHub Inc remains the owner of the original Atom project. From their perspective the successor of Atom is VSCode - developed by their parent company, - despite the claims by a former Atom engineer.
Zed is co-founded by one (or more?) original developer of Atom. So, it's a successor in a sense that it is a new project by the same author.
Atom was developed at GitHub, and GitHub Inc remains the owner of the original Atom project. From their perspective the successor of Atom is VSCode - developed by their parent company, - despite the claims by a former Atom engineer.