Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

flash of a persistent victim mentality that would plague him and the company for years to come as fair criticisms mounted.

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.

Early Zuckerberg had yet to become the muscled MMA fighting, patriotic foil-boarding, bison-killing, performative-tractor-riding-calf-feeding man that he would develop into over the next decade.

While most of the venture capitalists I knew tended to judge their startups by the very lowest of ethical bars, I assumed this investor was relieved that Zuckerberg’s childhood hero was not someone more problematic. (Not Stalin, not Hitler, not Mussolini? Phew! Let’s proceed with Series A!) Zuckerberg had underscored this imperial crush in a 2018 profile in the New Yorker after encountering the historical emperor while “studying good and bad and complex figures” from back when he attended Phillips Exeter Academy in high school. That would definitely apply to Augustus, who rose to power in Rome after the assassination of his adoptive father and thwarted dictator, Julius Caesar.

“Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” Zuckerberg explained to writer Evan Osnos. “What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today. Two hundred years feels unattainable.” That was the CliffsNotes version of Pax Romana, with only a glancing acknowledgment of the price of that peace, including subjugation, colonization, and so, so much death. Zuckerberg seemed to grok the downsides, noting the era “didn’t come for free.”

“When you think about the integrity of a system like this, it’s a little bit like fighting crime in a city. No one expects that you’re ever going to fully solve crime in a city. The police department’s goal is not to make it so that if there’s any crime that happens, that you say that the police department is failing,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s not reasonable. I think, instead, what we generally expect is that the integrity systems, the police departments, if you will, will do a good job of helping to deter and catch the bad thing when it happens and keep it at a minimum, and keep driving the trend in a positive direction and be in front of other issues too. So, we’re going to do that here.”

Let me break it down more simply: Mark. Cannot. Be. Fired. Ever. Neither can his progeny. He is an absolute emperor. And very much like the analog Augustus Caesar, his dream is to connect the world, no matter the cost. He talked about this over and over in our many conversations through the years, sometimes late at night on the phone: a world bound closer together by his invention, bound by digital ties, where we could all finally be one.

oh yeah, we paid for it all by funding the creation of the Internet with taxpayer dollars and then with our own data. They owe us. Yet, when the violence actually does harm, the companies respond with nothing more than apologies and persistent insistence that they will “do better.” But they will not do better, because they are incapable. In fact, the way the platform was built—the architecture, the DNA, the very bones of it—makes it impossible for them to “do better.”

Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,” he

While Zuckerberg was not evil, not malevolent, not cruel, what he was, and continued to be, was extraordinarily naïve about the forces he had unleashed. Time has since shown that Zuckerberg was woefully unprepared to rein in the power of his digital platform as Facebook’s population swelled to 3 billion active users and it became the most important and vast communications, information, advertising, and media behemoth the world had ever seen. No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the worst of them.

When the truth stands between a man and his next $100 million, the truth is always going to be escorted off the premises. More to the point was that this investor, like so many others, had become morally bankrupt, backing ever more cretinous characters like Kalanick. I didn’t say it out loud, but in my head I screamed a line that I wanted to say to an increasing number of players in the Internet space: “You’re so poor, all you have is your money!”

I had dubbed this trend “the grievance industrial complex,” which like the military industrial complex would swell to grotesque proportions over time.

Social media has also contributed to escalating rates of depression among young people, who are often addicted to their digital devices, mostly because the creators designed them to do just that.

A truism began to form in my brain about the lack of women and people of color in the leadership ranks of tech: The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives. Their personal experience informed the development of unfettered platforms. And, in turn, this inability to understand the consequences of their inventions began to curdle the sunny optimism of tech that had illuminated the sector. Silicon Valley had perfected the image of itself as a meritocracy and touted that as one of its greatest strengths—that anyone could become a billionaire. In fact, tech has always been a mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same. They keep copying themselves, choosing slight variations on the same avatar template. Financial success was proof of their talents, which was like the old cliché of starting on third base and thinking you hit a home run. Heterogeneity in nature makes for stronger species, but tech was pushing forward one of the most homogenous structures possible, in which true differences would never inform better decisions.

It felt like these men had the benefit of an if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed rule, while women got only one shot, if that. And if women complained about the unfairness of the situation or any mistreatment at work, they were ejected from the game. This became startlingly clear in the gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit waged by Ellen Pao against the famed venture firm Kleiner Perkins. Pao busted into the boys’ club with a formidable résumé that even the tech bros couldn’t deny. After nabbing multiple degrees from Princeton and Harvard and stints at a series of jazzy startups, Pao joined Kleiner, whose greatest hits include Sun Microsystems, Google, Amazon, and Genentech. In 2005, she was appointed chief of staff to its star partner, John Doerr.

But her tenure got more complicated as Pao tried to climb the ladder at Kleiner. She was named a junior investing partner, but never promoted to senior partner. When she was fired, she accused the firm of gender discrimination, which the firm denied and which led to her 2012 lawsuit and culminated in a 2015 trial. The Recode staff covered the trial extensively, offering wall-to-wall coverage, along with a series of scoops and features on top of that. One thing I was particularly proud of was that our relentless courtroom reporting shoved the topic into the mainstream and garnered an enormous amount of much-needed attention. Revelations included that women staffers on equal or higher levels than some men were asked to take notes in meetings. Women were also excluded from all-male ski trips and dinners where work was definitely discussed.

Still, his attitude crystallized my belief that the worst men operated with impunity, while the best were utterly clueless.

“Is it possible that I am really too ambitious while being too quiet while being too aggressive while being unlikable…. If you talk, you talk too much. If you don’t talk, you’re too quiet. You don’t own the room. If you want to protect your work, you’re not a team player. Your elbows are too sharp.”

He and Simpson went on to have a rich relationship. “The people who love you are the only ones that count,” he said to me. Then, tearing up, he added, “Don’t waste your time on anyone else.” And then, wonder of wonders, he gave me a hug.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW.”

“You’ve got to find what you love,” Jobs told the graduating class. “And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

I had fully soaked up another trait of Silicon Valley: the need for next.

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”

I truly believe that you should push yourself in areas where you are passionate, and if you don’t feel passion toward something, get out of it.

wanted to be one of those people who did not die before they had lived. I also thought a

But what stood out most for me was that he was zeroing in on a bigger issue, which I was becoming significantly more concerned with—the danger of these platforms using data to become the most powerful tool in history for propaganda and manipulation by malevolent people. Social

“The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”

the graveyards are full of once-busy people.

As Trump’s activity ramped up and verged into coded speech promoting violence,

“We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all,”

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.

Instead, Musk arrived cradling a small stuffed monkey cradling a small bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. Musk said the monkey was named “Harambe,” after the gorilla that was shot and killed after he grabbed and dragged a three-year-old boy who had slipped into the enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. He set Harambe on the table and left him there for the entire meeting, even addressing the stuffed animal now and then. Musk seemed to think this was hysterical. Sulzberger, the polar opposite of Musk, did not seem to notice.

Musk claimed the 420 reference was actually a mathematical coincidence and not a weed joke. Sure, dude. Ultimately, the jury found Musk was not liable for investors’ losses, which prompted Musk to declare, “Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!”

I noted that power had become far too concentrated in a small group of homogeneous people and that money had done its usual job of corrupting.

we move to a world more digitized and surveilled and where data is the ultimate power. And young people are the ones who will be impacted the most.

What worries me most is apathy in the face of all this Internet convenience. The deluge of digital, which is both necessary to participate in society while also increasingly addictive, makes it harder for anyone to act. It’s heartbreaking to see so little energy put into fighting back. But as Allen Ginsberg said so eloquently: “It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.” Despite the heartbreak, we must act. And we must do it quickly to push technology toward its potential for positive impact.

as we move to another Cambrian explosion, this time in the tech space around generative artificial intelligence.

I am intent on making people realize that all this information that is now digitized is actually us—tech companies have scraped from us a database of human intentions, as well as our hopes and dreams and knowledge and, most of all, our questions about our world. And in fact, we bought and paid for the Internet at its beginning, but largely tech companies have benefited from it. It is rightfully ours to own and use to better humanity rather than cheapen and deaden it.

In one discussion, Musk referenced Terry Bisson’s radio play They’re Made Out of Meat, about a pair of computer-based aliens, made out of bits and bytes, who have just visited Earth. “These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat,” says one alien to the other, astonished that our viscera held together by muscles and encased by epidermis could makse a machine. Musk, when he was in his charming prankster mode, as he used to be more often, began to call our lips “meat flaps” and our throat a “meat tube.” His salient point was that we needed to adapt for the coming revolution in artificial intelligence. His solution was to start a strange company called Neuralink to create a chip implant to improve the brain’s bandwidth and be upgradable. It’s an interesting and unproven gambit and also controversial for many reasons, including disturbing reports around its treatment of animals in testing.

AI. He described the landscape to me starkly in a 2023 interview: The places that I think people are landing include what we call pre-tragic, which is when someone actually doesn’t want to look at the tragedy—whether it’s climate or some of the AI issues that are facing us or social media having downsides. We don’t want to metabolize the tragedy, so we stay in naïve optimism. A pre-tragic person believes, humanity always figures it out. Then there’s the person who stares at the tragedy and gets stuck. In tragedy, you either get depressed or you become nihilistic. Harris correctly sees another path: There’s a third place to go, which is what we call post-tragic, where you actually accept and grieve through some of the realities that we are facing. You have to go through the dark night of the soul and be with that so you can be with the actual dimensions of the problems that we’re dealing with and you’re honest about what it would take to do something about it.

Pointing out these failings has remained my calling card, and I’m aware that me telling smart people to think smarter comes off as rude at times. I am not someone who apologizes a lot, and I try to behave so I don’t have to. This has been perhaps one of the distinguishing characteristics of my success over the years. Other attributes: Obnoxiousness. Persnicketiness. A distaste for lies. A proclivity to call out nonsense, no matter the power of the person uttering it. In fact, especially if the person is very powerful. That is most commonly called “speaking truth to power,” and it’s much easier to do in a democratic country like the U.S. Many others do not have this unique privilege, so if you can, I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. While speaking out can be risky, the rewards are both psychic and, sometimes, financial. At least, that’s been true for me. I have basically made a career of stepping out of line and did so when I gave up my path to power on the political beat at the Washington Post to start covering a nascent industry very few believed in.

He thought he was headed for the big time and then he just fell over one day, and that has informed everything I’ve done since. Which is to say, I don’t have time to wallow. You don’t have time, either. Nobody has time.