‘Burn Book’ author Kara Swisher on her life—and our broken tech indust

If Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, doubles as a history of the internet and its often jarring impact on our lives over the past three decades, it’s only natural. As she was establishing herself as an uncommonly well-sourced journalist, the online world was about to take off: The rise of AOL, followed by its disastrous merger with Time Warner, was among the dramatic arcs she chronicled early on.

Since then, Swisher has been the most entrepreneurial of reporters, both in the doggedness of her work and the ever-evolving array of venues where it’s manifested itself. After covering the tech beat for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s, she cofounded the latter publication’s D conference—the defining tech confab of its era—with columnist Walt Mossberg. That led to All Things D, a news site under the WSJ umbrella. In 2014, Swisher and Mossberg struck out on their own with the Code conference and Recode site, which were acquired by Vox Media the following year.

Today, Swisher hosts two podcasts for New York magazine—Pivot, with Scott Galloway, and her own On with Kara Swisher—and is a panelist on CNN’s The Chris Wallace Show. And then there’s Burn Book, which spans her story from childhood to her take on the OpenAI leadership crisis that unfolded last November. Much of it is devoted to her withering assessment of the tech industry’s most elite executives and the companies they run, which Swisher describes in the book as “key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and most of all, our minds, by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior.”

In a recent conversation, I spoke with Swisher about everything from whether she thinks government will rein in the tech giants (spoiler: no) to having a legacy as a reporter in an industry known for its relentless pace. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I read and enjoyed your books about AOL when they came out, but that was a long time ago, and they were quite different from this one. Were they in any way preparation for writing this kind of book?

Well, your whole career is preparation. There’s the early days when you’re young and you’re like, “Oh, look, planes can fly!” That kind of thing. And then you’re like, “Wait a minute—they can also crash!” By the end, you see the upsides and the downsides of everything a little bit better, probably.

This book is a memoir, but there’s a through line about your take on big tech’s impact on society and the quality of the stewardship of the relatively small number of people who are so powerful.

Some of the people I like a lot, and I think they’ve evolved. And some of the people I think have not, and have taken on topics they’re not even slightly experienced or wise enough to deal with. More to the point, one of the main themes is that our government has let us down in terms of having any kind of guardrails on any of this from lots of perspectives—financial, data privacy. You could go through the list—antitrust, and everything else. They’ve allowed these companies to become so enmeshed in our public life that they’re kind of running things.

And so, while I like a certain amount of these people, the idea of unaccountable and unlimited power with unlimited money is really frightening to me and creates all kinds of problems. Even if our elected officials are pretty terrible, they’re still elected.

The book is full of stories of you basically hanging out with these people before they were rich and powerful and famous. Did becoming so change them, or were they the same people all along?

Money changes people. Time changes people. An enormous amount of enablers licking you up and down all day changes you. The idea that you’re good in one thing, so you can be good in another. The glorification of these people really has an impact. Some of them make out okay, and some of them have lost the narrative in a way that’s really troubling.

You have a whole chapter on people you did like and respect, and say some nice things about Sam Altman at the very end.

It’s very clear I liked Steve Jobs. Sam Altman acts like an adult, and that’s always welcome. Honestly, it’s a super-low frigging bar. You have a 52-year-old making boob jokes almost continually. Anyone who doesn’t do that, we’re like, “Yay!” We run into their arms.

But it’s not just Sam. Tim Cook is thoughtful. Reed Hastings is thoughtful. Mark Cuban’s thoughtful. He’s certainly developed into a really interesting and wise person. What I appreciate is they’re willing to have real civil debate. And I’m not talking about Twitter-dunking here. I’m talking about real discussion. And so anybody in that group, I certainly would encourage. Not celebrate, but encourage.

“Government regulates all kinds of things”

Is there any chance that legislators will stop talking about installing some guardrails and actually do something?

I don’t think so. I live in Washington, D.C., now. They just decided to have a bipartisan commission on generative AI in the House because they can’t pass legislation. All they do is sit around and they chinwag, and they don’t do anything about it.

We didn’t pass a national privacy bill. We didn’t pass a national algorithmic transparency bill. We didn’t change our antitrust laws. We didn’t do even basic data bills. They’re all being done by the states, which is problematic at best. They’re going to have a bipartisan commission on what we should do. Why don’t you just do something?

Our whole political system is so partisan. It’s really impossible to get anything done. But it’s really disturbing that then the tech people get to do what they want. Once again, as always.

Do we need to get past the broader dysfunction of government to solve any of these problems?

Government regulates all kinds of things. It’s not perfect: It passes regulations on big pharma and they get away with all kinds of stuff. But there are some guardrails. The reactive qualities of government are quite good—the legal remedies that other companies have to pay.

With tech companies, it’s very hard to haul them into court. A regular person can’t do it, for the most part, for the damages they might cause. Even Donald Trump has to go to court, but not tech companies. There’s been some [attorney general] moves, but it’s been slow, and nothing’s happened yet.

I feel like government’s the only lever to use in this case because when you have unlimited money and unlimited power and your products are totally necessary to move around anywhere in this world at work or personally, I don’t see how you don’t have all the leverage and none of the cost.

“It has to be based on reporting”

You talk in the book about instances in which you gave advice to some of these tech executives. The upshot is usually that they didn’t follow it. But can you talk about squaring that with your role as a journalist?

By that time, I was a columnist. I didn’t do it when I was doing beat reporting with the Wall Street Journal. But when it evolved into All Things D, if you noticed, we had a point of view and we said it publicly. I got a lot of flack for that. It’s like, “How can your reporters say what they think?” I’m like, “Because they reported it and came to a conclusion, and they’re allowed to do that.”

It had to be based on reporting. Peter Kafka is an excellent example of that. He’s like, “Comcast did this today. Here’s why they did it. Let me tell you what I think is happening here.” And everybody does it now.

Were there times when they did listen to you?

They never listen to me. I’m just one point of reference for them. I think they listen to me when I write something publicly, but I don’t think they care what the media thinks. That’s overblown, the idea that I have influence on them.

Even with people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg where your overall portrait is extremely negative, there are moments where you say nice things about your interactions with them. Has it ever been a challenge to separate their role in society from your personal relationships with them?

Yes, a hundred percent. From everything I’ve seen of Mark in his personal life, he seems like a lovely parent. He seems like a caring husband. I know people around him, and he’s a good friend to a lot of people. I don’t socialize with him in any way—I can’t remember the last time I saw him physically, actually.

A lot of times, people would—let me use Mark as an example—take shots at his looks. And I’d be like, “Why are we talking about his looks? Why aren’t we talking about what he’s doing, his business?” I didn’t think it was fair to attack them personally, ever, ever, ever.

At the same time, someone I really did like and and thought was really interesting and was doing innovative things was Elon. He was funny. Again, I never socialized with him. He was not my friend, ever. I was surprised how he turned. When I look back on it, there were signs everywhere. But I certainly did not expect the hard-rightward turn. I don’t even know that’s the right word.

I’m not even sure what to call what he’s doing right now. It’s just weird is what it is. He had something happen during the COVID time period where he sort of lost the narrative. And obviously the Wall Street Journal stories on his use of drugs are an interesting development here, which I think everyone was aware of. And of course, being the richest person in the world allows you to be kind of a jerk all the time and not have any consequence. So that also plays into it, for sure.

“They didn’t know how to code”

In the nineties, you spent a lot of time talking to [Washington Post then-publisher] Don Graham about this internet thing. Was there an alternate universe where big media did everything perfectly and is in a much healthier state now?

No, they didn’t know how to code. Turns out that was a skill they needed to have. The only people who I thought actually [understood the internet’s implications for media] were Bob Iger and Barry Diller. Bob Iger was very interested in tech. Early on, when he was at ABC, he was in touch with me because I think he got it intuitively that this was going to change [everything].

I had an earlier experience covering retail for the Washington Post, and I saw how Walmart curbed them because Walmart didn’t advertise like their local retailers, and all the local retailers died because of Walmart. And then, now comes Craigslist, and now comes free news. It was right in front of them what was going to happen. But I just think they felt so wedded to their current business model. And that was sort of like continuing with AOL dial-up when dial-up was finished.

They just couldn’t make the move. And a lot of tech companies actually did. Look at Netflix. It was doing DVDs and then it shifted rather dramatically to digital—at its detriment, as you recall. Everybody said they were finished. And that was the correct move when they did that. But media couldn’t do that.

Is there anything that the media could do to restore some of the trust that it once had in society that’s been dwindling in recent years?

I don’t think it was ever trusted. If you go back in American history, and look at any of the early stuff between our Founding Fathers, they were always duking it out in partisan papers. And everyone had a real disregard for media for a long time, until Watergate for that brief shining moment. We fell into that trope that we were the saviors of civilization. And I think, in many ways, journalists can be but not always.

We certainly, in many ways, have not been as innovative as we need to be in order to earn that trust, and really show that we care for [readers] more than we care for ourselves. I think we tend to lord it over them quite a bit.

You say you don’t like it when people describe you as being both feared and liked. Why not? And how would you like to be perceived?

That was a headline in the New York magazine profile of me. I thought it was a very fair piece, but I just don’t understand what it means. Why am I scary? There’s a lot of real scary things in this world, and I don’t believe I’m one of them. And then “liked.” Okay, some people like me, some people don’t. Does that matter? Who cares if you like me?

I want to be described as fair. Not fair and balanced, but fair and truthful. I think I go with Christiane Amanpour’s “truthful, not neutral.” That seems to fit me rather well.

“Look over here, power’s being abused”

The book is called Burn Book, and it’s pretty opinionated. But did you let it all truly hang out? Did you ever feel like pulling any punches?

A couple of personal things. I know a lot about stuff like that, but I’m not talking about people’s personal lives. I was writing about them as business people. And when I had to write about their personal life like we did [at All Things D] with Sergey [Brin] and Anne [Wojcicki]’s divorce, that had a business implication, we ran away from that rather quickly.

I loved that you mentioned being proud of your coverage of Scott Thompson’s brief reign as Yahoo CEO. Given that that was the last time anybody cared about Scott Thompson, and even Yahoo isn’t in the news much anymore, was there a bigger story there? Or was it just kind of a weird and fascinating moment?

It was weird and fascinating at the time. It was important. [Current Yahoo CEO] Jim Lanzone isn’t doing a bad job with that company right now. As I said in the index, if you’re not in here, it’s because I’ve either forgotten who you are or I don’t care. I’m sure you do this: You look back at all your columns, and you’re like, “I don’t even remember writing this story.”

All the time.

I’ve forgotten more in a minute than most people remember in a lifetime about tech. If I didn’t remember it, then it wasn’t really important. But at the time, it was. I have to say our reporters at Recode and All Things D always did a bang-up job covering the stuff fairly and accurately and also with some fun and insight. And now I have Pivot, where I say what I think all the time, and I do reporting before I say it.

Most tech news is so ephemeral. Do you feel like you have a legacy in your reporting?

The reason I did the New York Times column was because of this. I was one of the more prominent people who brought people’s attention to the dangers of social media and the negative aspects of it. There’s lots of reporters who did a great job, so I’m not the only one. But I was like, “Look over here, power’s being abused.” And I feel good about that.

It’s been fun to watch you continuously reinvent yourself in the post All Things D, post Recode era. You wrote that you wanted to write a column, but you said you definitely didn’t want to write a column forever.

No, I didn’t. I’m the only person. Everyone’s like, “How could you give up a New York Times column?” I’m like, “It was easier than you think.” I just wasn’t as good at it. I just didn’t like it. If I don’t like doing something, I quit. That’s my whole policy now in my life.

I’m a little bit like the entrepreneurs: I’m very interested in what’s next, and so I try to keep myself fresh in that regard. And I think that’s the way most people in journalism should be because then you make better products. I’ve done pretty well, so it’s turned out to be pretty good to pay attention to my instincts.

Any items left on your bucket list in terms of journalism and media?

I love doing the CNN thing. I’m very interested in video, and I don’t know where it’s going, but I think Chris Wallace is amazing, and I’m learning a lot from him. Everyone’s like, “cable is dead.” I’m like, “No, no, it’s not!”

I’m sort of like Jon Stewart in that regard—he’s like, “Here I am, king of the dying medium!” I’m good with that. I don’t ever think people are right when they make declarative sentences about any global brand of communications.

If Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, doubles as a history of the internet and its often jarring impact on our lives over the past three decades, it’s only natural. As she was establishing herself as an uncommonly well-sourced journalist, the online world was about to take off: The rise of AOL, followed by its disastrous merger with Time Warner, was among the dramatic arcs she chronicled early on.

Since then, Swisher has been the most entrepreneurial of reporters, both in the doggedness of her work and the ever-evolving array of venues where it’s manifested itself. After covering the tech beat for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s, she cofounded the latter publication’s D conference—the defining tech confab of its era—with columnist Walt Mossberg. That led to All Things D, a news site under the WSJ umbrella. In 2014, Swisher and Mossberg struck out on their own with the Code conference and Recode site, which were acquired by Vox Media the following year.

Today, Swisher hosts two podcasts for New York magazine—Pivot, with Scott Galloway, and her own On with Kara Swisher—and is a panelist on CNN’s The Chris Wallace Show. And then there’s Burn Book, which spans her story from childhood to her take on the OpenAI leadership crisis that unfolded last November. Much of it is devoted to her withering assessment of the tech industry’s most elite executives and the companies they run, which Swisher describes in the book as “key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and most of all, our minds, by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior.”

In a recent conversation, I spoke with Swisher about everything from whether she thinks government will rein in the tech giants (spoiler: no) to having a legacy as a reporter in an industry known for its relentless pace. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I read and enjoyed your books about AOL when they came out, but that was a long time ago, and they were quite different from this one. Were they in any way preparation for writing this kind of book?

Well, your whole career is preparation. There’s the early days when you’re young and you’re like, “Oh, look, planes can fly!” That kind of thing. And then you’re like, “Wait a minute—they can also crash!” By the end, you see the upsides and the downsides of everything a little bit better, probably.

This book is a memoir, but there’s a through line about your take on big tech’s impact on society and the quality of the stewardship of the relatively small number of people who are so powerful.

Some of the people I like a lot, and I think they’ve evolved. And some of the people I think have not, and have taken on topics they’re not even slightly experienced or wise enough to deal with. More to the point, one of the main themes is that our government has let us down in terms of having any kind of guardrails on any of this from lots of perspectives—financial, data privacy. You could go through the list—antitrust, and everything else. They’ve allowed these companies to become so enmeshed in our public life that they’re kind of running things.

And so, while I like a certain amount of these people, the idea of unaccountable and unlimited power with unlimited money is really frightening to me and creates all kinds of problems. Even if our elected officials are pretty terrible, they’re still elected.

The book is full of stories of you basically hanging out with these people before they were rich and powerful and famous. Did becoming so change them, or were they the same people all along?

Money changes people. Time changes people. An enormous amount of enablers licking you up and down all day changes you. The idea that you’re good in one thing, so you can be good in another. The glorification of these people really has an impact. Some of them make out okay, and some of them have lost the narrative in a way that’s really troubling.

You have a whole chapter on people you did like and respect, and say some nice things about Sam Altman at the very end.

It’s very clear I liked Steve Jobs. Sam Altman acts like an adult, and that’s always welcome. Honestly, it’s a super-low frigging bar. You have a 52-year-old making boob jokes almost continually. Anyone who doesn’t do that, we’re like, “Yay!” We run into their arms.

But it’s not just Sam. Tim Cook is thoughtful. Reed Hastings is thoughtful. Mark Cuban’s thoughtful. He’s certainly developed into a really interesting and wise person. What I appreciate is they’re willing to have real civil debate. And I’m not talking about Twitter-dunking here. I’m talking about real discussion. And so anybody in that group, I certainly would encourage. Not celebrate, but encourage.

“Government regulates all kinds of things”

Is there any chance that legislators will stop talking about installing some guardrails and actually do something?

I don’t think so. I live in Washington, D.C., now. They just decided to have a bipartisan commission on generative AI in the House because they can’t pass legislation. All they do is sit around and they chinwag, and they don’t do anything about it.

We didn’t pass a national privacy bill. We didn’t pass a national algorithmic transparency bill. We didn’t change our antitrust laws. We didn’t do even basic data bills. They’re all being done by the states, which is problematic at best. They’re going to have a bipartisan commission on what we should do. Why don’t you just do something?

Our whole political system is so partisan. It’s really impossible to get anything done. But it’s really disturbing that then the tech people get to do what they want. Once again, as always.

Do we need to get past the broader dysfunction of government to solve any of these problems?

Government regulates all kinds of things. It’s not perfect: It passes regulations on big pharma and they get away with all kinds of stuff. But there are some guardrails. The reactive qualities of government are quite good—the legal remedies that other companies have to pay.

With tech companies, it’s very hard to haul them into court. A regular person can’t do it, for the most part, for the damages they might cause. Even Donald Trump has to go to court, but not tech companies. There’s been some [attorney general] moves, but it’s been slow, and nothing’s happened yet.

I feel like government’s the only lever to use in this case because when you have unlimited money and unlimited power and your products are totally necessary to move around anywhere in this world at work or personally, I don’t see how you don’t have all the leverage and none of the cost.

“It has to be based on reporting”

You talk in the book about instances in which you gave advice to some of these tech executives. The upshot is usually that they didn’t follow it. But can you talk about squaring that with your role as a journalist?

By that time, I was a columnist. I didn’t do it when I was doing beat reporting with the Wall Street Journal. But when it evolved into All Things D, if you noticed, we had a point of view and we said it publicly. I got a lot of flack for that. It’s like, “How can your reporters say what they think?” I’m like, “Because they reported it and came to a conclusion, and they’re allowed to do that.”

It had to be based on reporting. Peter Kafka is an excellent example of that. He’s like, “Comcast did this today. Here’s why they did it. Let me tell you what I think is happening here.” And everybody does it now.

Were there times when they did listen to you?

They never listen to me. I’m just one point of reference for them. I think they listen to me when I write something publicly, but I don’t think they care what the media thinks. That’s overblown, the idea that I have influence on them.

Even with people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg where your overall portrait is extremely negative, there are moments where you say nice things about your interactions with them. Has it ever been a challenge to separate their role in society from your personal relationships with them?

Yes, a hundred percent. From everything I’ve seen of Mark in his personal life, he seems like a lovely parent. He seems like a caring husband. I know people around him, and he’s a good friend to a lot of people. I don’t socialize with him in any way—I can’t remember the last time I saw him physically, actually.

A lot of times, people would—let me use Mark as an example—take shots at his looks. And I’d be like, “Why are we talking about his looks? Why aren’t we talking about what he’s doing, his business?” I didn’t think it was fair to attack them personally, ever, ever, ever.

At the same time, someone I really did like and and thought was really interesting and was doing innovative things was Elon. He was funny. Again, I never socialized with him. He was not my friend, ever. I was surprised how he turned. When I look back on it, there were signs everywhere. But I certainly did not expect the hard-rightward turn. I don’t even know that’s the right word.

I’m not even sure what to call what he’s doing right now. It’s just weird is what it is. He had something happen during the COVID time period where he sort of lost the narrative. And obviously the Wall Street Journal stories on his use of drugs are an interesting development here, which I think everyone was aware of. And of course, being the richest person in the world allows you to be kind of a jerk all the time and not have any consequence. So that also plays into it, for sure.

“They didn’t know how to code”

In the nineties, you spent a lot of time talking to [Washington Post then-publisher] Don Graham about this internet thing. Was there an alternate universe where big media did everything perfectly and is in a much healthier state now?

No, they didn’t know how to code. Turns out that was a skill they needed to have. The only people who I thought actually [understood the internet’s implications for media] were Bob Iger and Barry Diller. Bob Iger was very interested in tech. Early on, when he was at ABC, he was in touch with me because I think he got it intuitively that this was going to change [everything].

I had an earlier experience covering retail for the Washington Post, and I saw how Walmart curbed them because Walmart didn’t advertise like their local retailers, and all the local retailers died because of Walmart. And then, now comes Craigslist, and now comes free news. It was right in front of them what was going to happen. But I just think they felt so wedded to their current business model. And that was sort of like continuing with AOL dial-up when dial-up was finished.

They just couldn’t make the move. And a lot of tech companies actually did. Look at Netflix. It was doing DVDs and then it shifted rather dramatically to digital—at its detriment, as you recall. Everybody said they were finished. And that was the correct move when they did that. But media couldn’t do that.

Is there anything that the media could do to restore some of the trust that it once had in society that’s been dwindling in recent years?

I don’t think it was ever trusted. If you go back in American history, and look at any of the early stuff between our Founding Fathers, they were always duking it out in partisan papers. And everyone had a real disregard for media for a long time, until Watergate for that brief shining moment. We fell into that trope that we were the saviors of civilization. And I think, in many ways, journalists can be but not always.

We certainly, in many ways, have not been as innovative as we need to be in order to earn that trust, and really show that we care for [readers] more than we care for ourselves. I think we tend to lord it over them quite a bit.

You say you don’t like it when people describe you as being both feared and liked. Why not? And how would you like to be perceived?

That was a headline in the New York magazine profile of me. I thought it was a very fair piece, but I just don’t understand what it means. Why am I scary? There’s a lot of real scary things in this world, and I don’t believe I’m one of them. And then “liked.” Okay, some people like me, some people don’t. Does that matter? Who cares if you like me?

I want to be described as fair. Not fair and balanced, but fair and truthful. I think I go with Christiane Amanpour’s “truthful, not neutral.” That seems to fit me rather well.

“Look over here, power’s being abused”

The book is called Burn Book, and it’s pretty opinionated. But did you let it all truly hang out? Did you ever feel like pulling any punches?

A couple of personal things. I know a lot about stuff like that, but I’m not talking about people’s personal lives. I was writing about them as business people. And when I had to write about their personal life like we did [at All Things D] with Sergey [Brin] and Anne [Wojcicki]’s divorce, that had a business implication, we ran away from that rather quickly.

I loved that you mentioned being proud of your coverage of Scott Thompson’s brief reign as Yahoo CEO. Given that that was the last time anybody cared about Scott Thompson, and even Yahoo isn’t in the news much anymore, was there a bigger story there? Or was it just kind of a weird and fascinating moment?

It was weird and fascinating at the time. It was important. [Current Yahoo CEO] Jim Lanzone isn’t doing a bad job with that company right now. As I said in the index, if you’re not in here, it’s because I’ve either forgotten who you are or I don’t care. I’m sure you do this: You look back at all your columns, and you’re like, “I don’t even remember writing this story.”

All the time.

I’ve forgotten more in a minute than most people remember in a lifetime about tech. If I didn’t remember it, then it wasn’t really important. But at the time, it was. I have to say our reporters at Recode and All Things D always did a bang-up job covering the stuff fairly and accurately and also with some fun and insight. And now I have Pivot, where I say what I think all the time, and I do reporting before I say it.

Most tech news is so ephemeral. Do you feel like you have a legacy in your reporting?

The reason I did the New York Times column was because of this. I was one of the more prominent people who brought people’s attention to the dangers of social media and the negative aspects of it. There’s lots of reporters who did a great job, so I’m not the only one. But I was like, “Look over here, power’s being abused.” And I feel good about that.

It’s been fun to watch you continuously reinvent yourself in the post All Things D, post Recode era. You wrote that you wanted to write a column, but you said you definitely didn’t want to write a column forever.

No, I didn’t. I’m the only person. Everyone’s like, “How could you give up a New York Times column?” I’m like, “It was easier than you think.” I just wasn’t as good at it. I just didn’t like it. If I don’t like doing something, I quit. That’s my whole policy now in my life.

I’m a little bit like the entrepreneurs: I’m very interested in what’s next, and so I try to keep myself fresh in that regard. And I think that’s the way most people in journalism should be because then you make better products. I’ve done pretty well, so it’s turned out to be pretty good to pay attention to my instincts.

Any items left on your bucket list in terms of journalism and media?

I love doing the CNN thing. I’m very interested in video, and I don’t know where it’s going, but I think Chris Wallace is amazing, and I’m learning a lot from him. Everyone’s like, “cable is dead.” I’m like, “No, no, it’s not!”

I’m sort of like Jon Stewart in that regard—he’s like, “Here I am, king of the dying medium!” I’m good with that. I don’t ever think people are right when they make declarative sentences about any global brand of communications.