Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

“You had a stroke and we’re going to hospitalize you immediately since it looks like you are still having one right now.”

The lesson I learned from my stroke is that I didn’t want to slow down and that I enjoyed what I do and that I did not want to smell any flowers.

I thought a lot about Jobs, and it occurred to me that his most productive years were after he was initially diagnosed with cancer. In that period, he created the iPhone and the iPad and was working on reinventing television when he died.

The most perfect example of this was a consent decree that the company signed in 2011 that required users to be notified when their data was being shared by Facebook with third parties. After the scandal erupted in 2018 over whether political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had been able to access data of 87 million Facebook users without their permission, the Federal Trade Commission got a $5 billion settlement from the company over violating the first agreement. Even though it was a landmark figure in the U.S., I called the fine a “parking ticket,” since it’s hard to imagine that Facebook’s executives saw the payment as anything other than a cost of doing business.

“Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings.”

incentives shapes believes

So, I didn’t even bother to dial up Sandberg either before or after that meeting, because she seemed long past listening and what was the point? I did call one person, though, whom I thought could make a difference. Hello, Elon. It’s me.

I’d covered Twitter since it debuted in 2006, and for most of its history it had been a woefully underperforming business. A lot of the blame for this falls on the bony shoulders of cofounder Jack Dorsey.

In “Hatching Twitter,” journalist Nick Bilton quotes Zuckerberg telling close friends, “[Twitter is] such a mess, it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”

When these platforms lowered the boom, it felt like a relief. Still, it was troubling that only a handful of people made the decision to pull the plug on the still-official president of the United States. We had, in essence, privatized our public discourse and were now allowing billionaires to implement the rules of the road.

He loved to behave as if he were much younger than he was. Over time, his harmless fun became less harmless and less fun.

Musk had once messaged me, when I brought up the comparison. “I certainly don’t see myself as the next Steve Jobs. There will never be another.” Musk called that right. Because, as much as he was sometimes accused of being an asshole, too, Steve Jobs would have abhorred Musk 2023.

He reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote about the U.S.: “The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot—and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.” With Musk, it feels like it is only a question of time before we enter the Howard Hughes—another brilliant rich man who curdled badly—chapter of his story.

When he got the top job in 2015, it was both a surprise and a relief. Pichai has been more cautious than some inside prefer, especially around commercializing AI efforts. Google was quite early to pioneer AI, but slow to productize, a breach that Nadella at Microsoft quickly moved into with his investments in OpenAI and its ChatGPT.

He and Pichai both share the trait of acting their age in the best of ways.

Much later, after he left Facebook in exasperation, Systrom agreed and told me in an interview that the app had “lost its soul,” adding, “my biggest regret, I think, at Instagram is how commercial it got.”

In the U.S., Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, penned a groundbreaking essay on competition titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” and has tried to press some cases very late in the game.

That was sadly true for the late Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh, whom I think about a lot these days. Tony turned out to be a cautionary tale of what happens when too much creativity and entrepreneurship mixes with drug and alcohol abuse.

100%

Becoming a billionaire meant he could turn his visions of a better world into reality. Or so he hoped. I thought Tony’s theories were largely nonsense before he took them a step further, trying to transform the company with new management theories, and then part of downtown Vegas into a utopian startup city. At least Tony put his money where his heart was, pouring $350 million into the effort to create what he called “Holacracy.”

One coping mechanism was his belief that we were all living in a simulation—essentially a video game being played by beings far beyond our knowledge or capabilities. This was not an uncommon debate among techies, but Tony seemed to actually believe it. When he brought it up onstage at an event in Vegas, I laughed it off. But backstage, he grabbed my hand, looked into my eyes, and said without a trace of his usual cheeriness: “I’m serious. This is not real. We are not real.”

But the Silicon Valley death that hit me the hardest—and was very much a surprise—was someone with whom I clicked with as more than a subject, even though I covered his more famous friends and his spouse regularly. That was Dave Goldberg, longtime entrepreneur in online music and more, investor, adviser, and the husband of Sheryl Sandberg. His death diminished us all.

Why? I trusted Dave—nicknamed Goldie—to tell me the truth whenever I called him, and I cannot say that about a lot of people I cover. It was hard not to feel affection for someone who was such a mensch. In a eulogy about him, I noted: “That is exactly the word you would use to describe Dave—a Yiddish term that means a person of integrity and honor, a stand-up guy, someone to admire and emulate, a rock of humanity.”

I recall thinking at the time that I really needed to get a grip on my own attitude and schedule, because here was a very busy man who never seemed busy and that manifested so clearly with his kids.”