Kara Swisher is unsmiling when she appears on my screen over Zoom from the United States. And who can blame her? The pioneering tech journalist has always been in demand to talk about industry leaders, but since the US election, and the installation of billionaire Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk is using to dismantle US government spending, many in the media are turning to her for commentary.
Swisher’s memoir, Burn Book, (yes, it’s a reference to the classic teen film, Mean Girls) was released early last year in the US, but in light of what’s going on in America now, it’s more pertinent than ever.
While it’s a memoir of Swisher’s career as a journalist who was practically embedded in Silicon Valley from the industry’s earliest days (with a contact book that featured everyone from Steve Jobs to Musk), Burn Book also offers insights into the entrepreneurs and investors, and the backstories behind companies including Amazon, Yahoo and Google, notably detailing the dysfunctional tech bros behind the scenes. She’s regarded as Silicon Valley’s “most feared” but also “most liked” journalist.
Burn Book is also, Swisher says, “a warning, in many ways” of what’s happening in the US now. And just what the hell is going on? “It’s a constitutional crisis – that’s what we’re calling it here,” Swisher says.
She is shocked by Musk’s new role. The day we speak, media focus has been on his all-male team of young engineers, employed to help him, seemingly, seize control of federal infrastructure.
“Today, he tweeted that I’m threatening his engineers – the world’s worst parent thinks me, one of the better parents of the world, is threatening his little children, his little children of the corn,” Swisher says.
She first met the billionaire in the late 1990s when she was the technology correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and he was working at a company called Zip2, an online version of the Yellow Pages phone directory.
Initially, the pair were amicable – like others in the industry, Musk would share breaking news with Swisher, and even seek her advice. In Burn Book, she writes that she believed he had a vision for creating a better world. But she goes on to refer to Musk’s story as “one of the saddest developments in my long love story with tech”.
Swisher does not hold back in her memoir, Burn Book.
Initially, he had visionary ideas and, it seemed, a conscience; the world’s richest man was once a climate champion. “He doesn’t care about that,” Swisher says. “Maybe he didn’t believe it in the first place, or maybe he was an opportunist, or maybe he’s had a shift in his personality. It’s hypocritical in the extreme, for sure.”
Things started to shift during the COVID-19 pandemic; Musk was public about his misgivings around the lockdowns and threatened to walk out of an interview with Swisher when she pressed him about it. Then in 2022, Musk sent her an email calling her an “asshole” over a post on X.
Swisher interviews Bill Gates last year.Credit: Getty Images for Netflix
She’s not entirely sure what happened. “I don’t know what it was – his ketamine use, COVID, his trans daughter – there’s all kinds of psychological problems that were never addressed as a child. That seems to be the case with lots of them,” she says, referring to other “tech bros”.
“But nobody’s quite as … without any shame as he is. Some of them are a little less risk tolerant and he’s not. So here we are.”
For Musk, it’s never been about money, she says, but about power. “He has power, and he sees a way in, and he has some goals including going to Mars and others that he thinks could happen if he is adjacent to power. So that’s what he’s done – incredibly well.”
US President Donald Trump, she says, is merely a vehicle for Musk and other billionaires.“They look at him as a tool to get the things they want and that’s what they’re doing.”
Growing up, Swisher wanted to work in military intelligence or with the CIA but as a gay woman, was unwilling to accept the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy then in place in the military. She considered architecture but after writing for her college newspaper, switched to journalism, landing a job at The Washington City Paper, before completing an internship at The Washington Post, where she was hired. She started in the business section, covering a small company called AOL, and other internet providers, in the days of dial-up modems – and when many of her older colleagues were sceptical about the internet and its implications.
But Swisher understood immediately how important this new media was going to be, predicting early that “everything that can be digitised, will be digitised”.
By 1997, she was a Wall Street Journal columnist and it didn’t take long for her to cement her career; she was soon considered the most influential internet reporter. With her colleague, Walt Mossberg, she launched the All Things Digital Conference (later renamed Recode), which featured live interviews with everyone from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg (whom Swisher calls a “sad weather vane ... he has no compass whatsoever”.)
Swisher describes Musk’s reinvention as “hypocritical in the extreme”.Credit: AP
In the mid-1990s, she wrote AOL.com, a book about what was at the time the world’s biggest online company. Her 2003 book, There Must Be A Pony In There Somewhere, something of a sequel to AOL.com, detailed AOL’s merger with Time Warner.
But Burn Book is her most personal, revealing that her cynicism has always been balanced with a love of the industry and an optimism for its future. Does she still have that optimism?
“Not right now, not today,” she says. “It’s hard to get excited about the latest pair of spectacles from Facebook when this is happening. You know, there’s so much promise for tech to improve people’s lives, and instead they’re busy ruining them.”
She’s not a “pearl clutcher”, she says, but she believes the industry is now making things worse for the US and the world.
“And they don’t want to take responsibility … and all they do is tell you what’s wrong. You know, you’re too much DEI, too much ‘woke’ – that’s not the problem with our country. Our problem is a whole bunch of things. But instead, they seize on this because they’re sad, little, victimised, arrested-development men. And it’s all men – there’s a few women enablers. They always have a pack of complicit women along with them on the journey, but it’s men.”
But they did mostly start from a point of optimism?
“Optimism is different for everybody – it’s an optimism that has to do with hustle porn. That’s not optimism. It’s just weird testosterone.”
Swisher does, though, have a tip: don’t fear AI. We should, she says, be harnessing it for good. “We should use AI but as long as it’s used for all of us – as long as we all get an equal measure of use out of it. The problem is when big companies are in charge of everything.”
It’s time for people to use AI to create, she says, citing AI’s potential for use in medicine, transport and education.
Innovation in the US, Swisher says, has come from “bottom up” rather than top down. “So we should all be trying to use AI to our advantage before it’s behind a paywall.”
Kara Swisher will appear at RMIT Storey Hall, presented by The Wheeler Centre, on March 6 (wheelercentre.com), the Adelaide Writers Week (March 1-6), and in Sydney at the All About Women festival (March 5, 8-9).
Burn Book by Kara Swisher (Hachette) is out now.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.