Reporter’s memoir turns up heat on her beat, tech titans
Technology is so pervasive and invasive that it’s polarizing people, producing feelings of love and loathing for its devices, online services and the would-be visionaries behind them.
Longtime Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher unwraps how we got to this point in her incendiary memoir, “Burn Book,” coming out Tuesday, an exposé that also seeks to avert technological calamity on the perilous road ahead.
Swisher skewers many of the once-idealistic tech moguls who, when she met them as entrepreneurs decades ago, promised to change the world for the better but often chose a path of destructive disruption instead. And along the way, they amassed staggering fortunes that have disconnected them from reality.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who broke into a sweat during an on-stage interview with Swisher in 2010, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who talked to her regularly before cutting her off after he bought Twitter in 2022, are painted in the harshest light.
“If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing,” Swisher writes in her 300-page book.
That’s one of the milder critiques in what’s a mostly scathing takedown by someone who became one of the most respected and feared reporters on tech since she began covering the industry in the 1990s.
CEOs, including Zuckerberg and Musk, regularly granted her exclusive interviews, fed her scoops and sometimes even secretly called her for advice, according to her book.
Swisher told The Associated Press that she hopes “Burn Book” serves as a shot across the bow of the technology industry and governments around the world, a warning that the same missteps that happened during the past 20 years must not be repeated as artificial intelligence seeps into all corners of society.
“Don’t get fooled a second time,” Swisher said of what she hopes the book’s main takeaway will be. “We need our government to make these (technology-industry) people accountable and that has not happened. ... We need to stop letting them off the hook.”
Swisher also devotes an entire chapter to the tech industry’s “mensches,” a list that includes Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, investor Mark Cuban and the late Dave Goldberg, who was CEO of SurveyMonkey. She also has mostly kind words for the likes of former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Apple CEO Tim Cook and his late predecessor, Steve Jobs.
Swisher said she hopes she will look back kindly on the tech leaders at the vanguard of AI, especially Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the startup behind the chatbot ChatGPT.
“One thing I do like about Sam is he is able to hold two conflicting ideas in his head at the same time,” Swisher said. “Of course, he is going to be a techno-optimist, but he is not a techno-idiot. Now what will be a problem is he just takes whatever he wants, even though he has warned of unsafe things, and then does nothing about them.”