Burn Book

Kara Swisher, a veteran technology journalist who covered Silicon Valley for three decades, frames her memoir around a central argument: The tech industry, which began with idealistic founders promising to change the world, has instead produced a class of compromised billionaires whose carelessness has damaged society.

Swisher opens with a December 2016 scene at a San Francisco farmers market, where she received a tip that Silicon Valley's most powerful CEOs had been summoned to Trump Tower to meet President-Elect Donald Trump, with the guest list compiled by investor Peter Thiel. Swisher called Tesla CEO Elon Musk to warn him not to attend, but Musk insisted he could influence Trump. She urged tech leaders to issue a joint public statement defending values like immigration and science. They ignored her. The episode crystallizes her disillusionment with an industry whose leaders once championed mottos like Google's "Don't Be Evil" but capitulated to power without conditions.

Swisher recounts her formative years to explain her combative reporting style. Born in 1962, she grew up on Long Island. Her father, an anesthesiologist, died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was five, instilling a permanent sense of life's brevity. At Georgetown University, she was a closeted lesbian in a hostile environment but found her calling through the school paper, winning the top journalism award as a freshman. Anti-gay discrimination blocked her dream of a military or intelligence career, so she turned to journalism. Early in her career, she ghostwrote for television host John McLaughlin, then quit after McLaughlin sexually harassed a colleague and no action was taken. She spoke on the record about the harassment in the Washington Post, a professionally risky but defining act.

At the Post in the early 1990s, Swisher experienced the Internet firsthand during a fellowship at Duke University, arriving at her guiding principle: "Everything that can be digitized will be digitized" (31). She met Steve Case, CEO of America Online (AOL), who predicted his company would become bigger than Time Warner. She forged a partnership with Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's celebrated tech columnist, who urged her to move to California. At thirty-four, she left the Post and joined the Journal as its first dedicated Internet reporter.

In Silicon Valley, Swisher covered the first Internet boom. She profiled Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose browser company went public in 1995 at a nearly $3 billion valuation, and Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. She grew skeptical of inflated valuations early, warning that companies like online grocery service Webvan and delivery startup Kozmo.com were unsustainable. Webvan filed for bankruptcy; Kozmo.com collapsed after burning through $250 million.

She covered Google's rise from a garage startup to a dominant force. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the most effective search engine in history and paired it with an innovative advertising platform. When Swisher saw an internal growth chart revealing Google was overtaking Yahoo, which was licensing Google's search technology, Page told her, "Don't tell them" (71). She immediately warned Yahoo co-founder Yang, who laughed it off. Google adopted the motto "Don't Be Evil," which Swisher considers both arrogant and naïve; she warned the founders her concern was not the good people in charge but "the bad people later" (78).

In Seattle, she met Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon she considered not a tech company but "a souped-up logistics company" (84). Bezos struck her as "feral" in his ambition but refreshingly honest about his goals, never resorting to the idealistic rhetoric common in Silicon Valley.

The dotcom bubble burst between 2000 and 2002, killing roughly 800 Internet companies. AOL's disastrous $182 billion merger with Time Warner, which Swisher calls "the heist of the century" (92), became the era's defining failure. She dubs the crash "the end of the beginning" (101), arguing that the important companies of the next era would emerge from the wreckage.

In 2003, Swisher and Mossberg launched D: All Things Digital (ATD), a live journalism conference within the Journal. Their marquee guest was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whom Swisher considers the most consequential figure of the modern tech age. She recounts the historic 2007 joint interview between Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, which nearly collapsed when Jobs called Microsoft "hell" before breaking the tension by offering Gates a cold bottle of water. That same year, Jobs introduced the iPhone, transforming the industry by enabling mobile companies like Uber and Instagram. As tech seized control of content distribution, traditional media companies from Time Warner to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp failed repeatedly at digital ventures.

Jobs died in October 2011. A week later, Swisher had a stroke in Hong Kong. Doctors discovered a hole in her heart and a genetic blood mutation called factor V Leiden. The experience reinforced her refusal to slow down, echoing Jobs' famous Stanford commencement speech about death as a clarifying tool.

Swisher devotes extensive attention to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose first words to her were "I heard you think I'm an asshole" (153). She traces Facebook's trajectory from scrappy startup to a platform whose architecture prioritized growth over safety, detailing a pattern of privacy violations followed by inadequate apologies: the Beacon tracking tool, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and global misinformation from Russian election interference to violence in Myanmar. In a 2018 interview, Zuckerberg told Swisher that Holocaust deniers might not be lying intentionally; Facebook allowed them to remain on the platform for two more years. She calls Zuckerberg "one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn't even know it" (164).

She chronicles Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's toxic leadership as emblematic of Silicon Valley's broader problems with sexism. Engineer Susan Fowler's 2017 blog post about harassment at Uber broke through where years of reporting had not. Swisher identifies a structural cause: Tech's overwhelmingly male leadership had "never felt unsafe a day in their lives" (171) and could not anticipate the harms their platforms enabled. She also covers Ellen Pao's gender discrimination lawsuit against venture firm Kleiner Perkins, which Pao lost but which surfaced widespread industry sexism. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017.

The memoir's other major thread follows Swisher's evolving relationship with Musk. After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, Musk descended into what Swisher considers destructive behavior: tweeting a homophobic conspiracy theory about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and telling advertisers to "go fuck yourself" (236). She concludes that while Zuckerberg is the most damaging figure in tech, Musk is the most disappointing.

Swisher and Mossberg left Dow Jones in 2013 after years of friction, founding the tech news site Recode with investment from NBC News and Windsor Media. She sold Recode to Vox Media in 2015, launched podcasts including Recode Decode and Pivot (co-hosted with NYU professor Scott Galloway), and joined the New York Times as an opinion columnist in 2018. She married journalist Amanda Katz in 2020, had two more children, and moved to Washington, D.C.

In the book's final chapter, Swisher confronts generative artificial intelligence as the next critical challenge. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted to her, "We are messing around with something we don't truly understand" (291). She notes that after a quarter century of the Internet age, no significant U.S. legislation governs tech. At her final Code conference, the successor to the ATD events, in 2022, she sat with Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs, designer Jony Ive, and Apple CEO Tim Cook to discuss Jobs' legacy. Swisher closes by arguing that tech remains a canvas of promise, but its future depends on whether decisions are made by a small group of billionaires or by diverse voices willing to listen. She urges readers to "always look up" (297).