Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

After the camera stopped rolling, I pressed Thiel on the need to ensure gays had the same rights to be married and have children as straight people. Both Thiel and I are famously gay, but he argued that gays should not get “special rights,”

When people get really rich, they seem to attract legions of enablers who lick them up and down all day.

Investor Chris Sacca, who also was not invited to the meeting, likewise seemed to grasp what was happening, boiling it down beautifully. “It’s funny, in every tech deal I’ve ever done, the photo op comes after you’ve signed the papers,” he told me. “If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news, and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower. Short of that, they are being used to legitimize a fascist.”

“Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”

French philosopher Paul Virilio has a quote I think about a lot: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”

Instead, far too many of these founders and innovators were careless, an attitude best summarized by the ethos on early Facebook office posters: “Move fast and break things.”

Twitter, stupidly renamed X,

Chinese-owned TikTok makes parents feel better by employing safety features for teens, while the site could be extending the Communist Party’s surveillance state across the globe, according to increasing numbers of government officials I have interviewed around the world.

Evil, in fact, does tend to prevail.

At a 2007 AllThingsD conference well-known tech columnist Walt Mossberg and I hosted, Apple legend Steve Jobs appeared onstage and said: “I like Star Trek. I want Star Trek.”

Actual memories faded quickly and all that was left were analog photos. In every single image, my father looks sunny and hopeful as he beams at the camera.

A stint in the Navy had paid for college and medical school, and after rising to a lieutenant commander rank, he took his first big civilian job running the anesthesiology department at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. He used the windfall to buy his first house for his growing family. Then he died before he had even moved in.

He was only 34 years old. Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning more than 20 years ago. My room was so dark that when I came out into the hall to help wake him for breakfast, the brightness of the day slapped me back to the shadowy doorway. I watched from there as my brother knocked purposefully on the door of my parents’ bedroom to get my father up. The door was locked, and Jeffrey turned the knob round and round and hit the door with his hip. He just didn’t give up, though no amount of shoving was going to open it, I remember thinking at the time. That was me, the practical one, with the unlikely childhood understanding that some things just aren’t ever going to move. We both thought my father had fallen into a deep sleep in there while writing a speech he was to give the next day. So, my older brother Jeff kept kicking the door and smacking it and making such a noise that my mother finally came up, knocked impatiently and said, “Bush, Bush, open up the door right now; you’re making Jeff very upset.” But he did not wake. After that, it was quick: The firemen coming to ax the door to splinters, the ambulance and stretcher with all sorts of things hanging off of it. And the extraordinary silence when it was over. I went back into my cocoon of a room, well before they carried my father out, and only imagine now the gurney with him on it, the white sheet, the hysterical cries of my mother fo...

Her choice for a second husband was the polar opposite of my kind and merry father, who was, I always thought, too good for this world. One of the first things my stepfather did was to take the house my dad was so proud of and sell it. He also gave away my father’s dog, a basset hound named Prudence. Erasing all those parts of my father seemed a weird flex, and my mother—whose own life had gone off the rails so abruptly—did not resist.

there was a plus to being raised by someone I came to think of as a villain—I became extraordinarily fast on my feet. My stepfather also taught me to play backgammon and Risk, games of both luck and boldness, which helped me become a very good tactical and strategic thinker. I lost a dog but got very good at gamesmanship and general mindfuckery.

Even though it was just eight inches long, I was furious that a news organization that I admired could be so sloppy. I decided to call the paper on my dial-up phone and was so irksome in my desire to correct the record that I managed to get then Metro editor Larry Kramer on the line. I told him that I was disappointed in their inaccuracies. He challenged me to come down and say that to his face and asked me if I thought I could do better. I would, and I could. I took the bus from campus to the Post’s headquarters on 15th Street NW. When I appeared, Larry and I continued to debate the crappy story he had published. Exasperated by my insistence that it was an embarrassment, even for a very short story, Kramer hired me on the spot as a stringer for the paper.

But what struck me was how easily people could be manipulated by fear and rage and how facts could be destroyed without repercussions.

‘Babylon was.’ Which means, I think, that every major power falls at some point no matter how they strive and struggle.

Then and there, I decided that was the best way to go through life—not caring about the consequences of saying or doing what I believed was right.

“You can’t die soon enough for me, Dr. McLaughlin.” I wish I had. In years to come, I would not miss those opportunities. Life is far too short, as I had learned at five years old. I did not have the time to waste.

As prolific tech pioneer Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, early iterations of the graphical user interface, and more, once mused: “The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.” He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”

That’s why Walt was also the most highly paid editorial staffer at the Journal, and deservedly so. He had the highest standards of journalistic integrity, never becoming a slobbering fanboy like so many.

In fact, Walt chose to live in D.C., far away from Silicon Valley, in order to maintain the distance needed to judge the products fairly.

While Walt was often on the phone with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or the many moguls who wanted his ear, he always kep...

The Internet was different. I was determined to tell people not how the watch worked, but what time it was.

Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative. Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. Tech is littered with men whose parents—typically fathers—were either cruel or absent. By the time they grew to be adults, many were unhappy and often had some disgruntled tale of being misunderstood before they were proved triumphantly right. Most of all, the damaged ones shared one sad attribute: They all seemed achingly lonely.

I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” But this declaration leaves out a lot about who’s responsible when things go terribly awry and real people get hurt.

“We have no competition/We have a lot of competition.” (Sigh.)

“Do you own the rights to the shows? You need to own the intellectual property to do that,” I said to Page. He looked at me blankly and walked on.

PayPal, which was founded in 1998, and its rival X.com, an online bank. One of X’s founders was a quirky young man who had scored $22 million from the sale of his first company, an online yellow pages type business that he had ultimately lost control of. His name was Elon Musk. No one had ever heard of Musk then, and he would be far down the tech hierarchy compared to Bezos, although later they would become fierce rivals in the space race. Musk did not initially clock in with me, and I hardly wrote about him when X merged with PayPal, a company filled with more promising entrepreneurs, like Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. At the time, Musk was just one of so many prospectors who had rushed into Silicon Valley in search of Internet gold. The only thing I can recall clearly about him at the time is that he liked cars. A lot. And he wanted to buy a pricey one when he cashed in.

While browsing at a Carter’s discount store, I saw on the rack a striped, red-and-white onesie that I could not stop coming back to because the thought suddenly entered my brain that a baby I’d have someday would wear it. So, I paid $8.99 and took the onesie home and kept it with me in a small box, tags on, until Louie Swisher was born twenty years later. It fit him perfectly.

To his credit, Bezos was not even slightly embarrassed, as many men were, and seemed to find the whole process fascinating. Logistics, I guess. At one point, he asked me why I would use an anonymous donor versus someone I knew… like him. It was in no way an offer, but I joked back that while he was rich, certainly an attractive trait, he was too short and bald for my needs. Of course, he broke out into his famous laugh, and his chortling attracted the attention of the entire party.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. —LAO TZU

I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones. Microsoft was beating Apple in the early innings, but creativity is what kept Apple in the game. Unfortunately, the AOL deal with Time Warner was about consolidation, not creativity.

So, that makes you an enormous Windows software developer. Steve: We are. Walt: How does that make you feel? Steve: We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people that say iTunes is their favorite app on Windows. It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.

Gates thought Jobs to be precious in his approach, and Jobs thought Gates had little respect for product excellence.

If both died on the same day, one observer told me, Gates’s obituary would begin by noting that he was “the world’s richest man” while Jobs’ would begin with the words “tech’s greatest visionary.”

Our hope was to avoid some of the internecine squabbles that the pair had become well known for over the decades. Big thoughts and big ideas and no trash talk,

Afterward in the demo area, Jobs asked me what I thought of Ping. “It sucks and it’s going to be a failure and, most of all, Chris Martin hurts my ears,” I replied. He grimaced. Martin was a friend of his. But after a few back-and-forths, Jobs said, “You’re probably right.” He acknowledged that Apple was following in the social space and not leading, a fact he hated as much as he hated Facebook and Myspace. I can tell you very few figures in positions of power like Jobs ever admitted even the slightest mistake to me that readily.

He utterly rejected the idea of speed (move fast) and destruction (break things). He believed in working for as long as you needed to get the design and technology right, which was one of Apple’s persistent characteristics.

At the 2005 ATD, Jobs turned to the audience and asked, “How many of you have heard of podcasts?” Guess how many people raised their hands? No one.

take Jobs saying this: “One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press. We all know what’s happened to economic businesses. News gathering and editorials are important. I don’t want to descend into a nation of bloggers.”

Suffice it to say that this is something Jobs never would have done and, in fact, would have abhorred. I am also certain Jobs would have despised Musk in his current incarnation.

Most historians credit William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson with the design of the first motion picture camera. Sadly, for Dickson, when it came time to fill out the 1891 patent application for the Kinetograph, his boss Thomas Edison decided to put his own name down as the inventor, a classic tech-bro move.

Zuckerberg revealed his true feelings about users who handed over data so easily. “They ‘trust me,’ dumb fucks,” he wrote. Seems nice.

Victimhood was an ever-present emotion that would flare across the entire tech brotherhood, especially as founders and executives began to get much-needed pushback.

Most thought he was just another tech bro who was—say it with me now—frequently wrong, but never in doubt.

Unlike the perpetually intriguing Jobs, Zuckerberg had almost no charm or game and it was painful how socially awkward he was then.

When I left, I was handed one of Zuckerberg’s famous business cards that said “I’m CEO… bitch”—an obnoxious comment masquerading as a joke. God, I really hated that card.