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While Amazon was small, Bezos thought big. He was most interested in systems and distribution, which he understood were the key to what he wanted to build. Having been a retail reporter, I could see that what he was selling had less to do with tech chops and more to do with how automated and data-driven Amazon could become. “You’re not a tech company, you’re a souped-up logistics company,” I said to him once. He responded with that maniacal laugh.
On January 10, 2000, AOL forked over $182 billion of its highly inflated stock and debt to buy Time Warner. The media giant owned Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, TBS, and Time Warner Cable, as well as Time, People, and Sports Illustrated magazines, while AOL had just 30 million subscribers to its largely dial-up service. Later, this acquisition would be dubbed by me as “the heist of the century.”
I wrote a book about this entire debacle called There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere.
AOL, Time-Warner purchase.
The problem was AOL’s business was soon to crater as that boom turned to bust, and its once lofty stock would become almost worthless. In this simplistic scenario, the trade of the century soon became known as the worst deal in history.
AOL Time Warner’s stock dropped 75 percent within two years of the deal’s completion. It didn’t help that executives on both sides warred and AOL’s sometimes dicey accounting issues got more scrutiny by reporters and regulators.
Even in those anti-digital times, I was still a believer in the essential idea and promise of the technical innovations that had burst on the scene at the end of the last century. I went full Churchill and dubbed the crash “the end of the beginning.”
.com crash in early-2000s.
While having a column in a major publication was the goal for most journalists, I felt trapped in a prison of expectations from a medium I barely believed in.
I wanted to write what I knew based on careful reporting, the network of sources I’d built, and the expertise I’d acquired. I started calling it “reported analysis” to distinguish my take from the ill-informed punditry that had been littering the media landscape.
Jobs was a charmer and came back year after year, enjoying the heat and the challenge. In 2007, he shared our stage for a historic joint interview with his longtime nemesis Bill Gates. This extraordinary meeting of tech’s two greatest pioneers revealed both their deep rivalry and enduring respect. It would turn out to be one for the ages.
Most Apple products are well made, meticulously designed, and work beautifully. Some tech innovators focus on the product and others focus on the consumer. Jeff Bezos, for example, approached Amazon with an astonishing consumer sensibility. He’d do anything for the customer—almost to a fault. But Jobs pushed Apple to be more of a product-driven culture. Other companies didn’t seem to care about either the consumer or the product. It sucks when people settle for an uninspiring product. Facebook comes to mind.
the first iPhone would be released to the public for $499 and a two-year contract with AT&T. Jobs had announced its arrival on January 9, 2007,
By 2010, Apple’s market valuation would surpass Microsoft’s, a major milestone.
unlike most CEOs in Silicon Valley, he contemplated the impact of technology and new media on society. He liked journalism—at least in theory, although in practice he was a master manipulator of the press. Still, 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.” Compare that with Elon Musk—who might have been the natural inheritor of Jobs’ status—tweeting on March 23, 2023, that all
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“We have the same values now as we had then. Maybe we are a little more experienced and certainly more beat up. But the core values are the same. We come into work wanting to do the same thing today as we did five or ten years ago, which is build the best products for people,” said Jobs, noting that getting emails from satisfied customers fueled him daily. “That’s what kept me going five years ago and that’s what kept me going ten years ago when the doors were almost closed. And it’s what will keep me going five years from now whatever happens. So, I don’t see why you have to change if you get
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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.
Chad Hurley, the cofounder of YouTube.
he was patient. It took until 2019, with the rollout of Disney+, for some tech success to come to the Magic Kingdom. Disney+’s breakout hit was The Mandalorian, a Star Wars spin-off made possible by Iger’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm. The pricey plunge into streaming was the right call for the company, which had the intellectual property to fill up its offering and satisfy its customers. Disney+ reached over 160 million subscribers in 2022 (including me since my daughter needs to watch Frozen at least eight times a week).
“He” is Bob Iger, CEO of Disney.
“Hollywood is now irrelevant,” Diller told me in a 2019 interview. “Netflix has won this game. I mean, short of some existential event, it is Netflix’s. No one can get, I believe, to their level of subscribers, which gives them real dominance.” And although studios did catch up to some extent, Diller said out loud what Hollywood had refused to acknowledge for a decade.
Netflix was founded by Marc Randolph and Hastings as a DVD delivery service that depended on the U.S. postal service. In 2007, they announced a shift to a video on demand service of OPC (other people’s content). Netflix would not generate original content until House of Cards in 2013. At first, Netflix offered a sweet deal for the studios, creating another lucrative revenue stream. That is, until they realized that they were selling away their seed corn that allowed Netflix to feast and grow huge. Iger likened it to giving a nuclear weapon to a developing country, which was quickly followed by
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YouTube also seemed to come out of nowhere, founded in 2005 by former PayPal employees Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. After cleaning the clock of Google Video, YouTube triggered a bidding war between the search company and Yahoo. The founders finally agreed to selling to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. (Some fifteen years later, YouTube generated $28.8 billion in revenue for Alphabet in a single year.)
internal texts from Zuckerberg revealed his true feelings about users who handed over data so easily. “They ‘trust me,’ dumb fucks,” he wrote. Seems nice. While Mark later expressed regret over that sentiment, it was an accurate narrative of a hardening culture that prioritized growth over safety.
In truth, Zuckerberg seemed very vulnerable to me, especially since he appeared less angry than perplexed as to why the world was being so unfair to him. After all, he had gifted it the invention of Facebook. This was the first, but far from the last, 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,
“man-boys,” which was not nice, I know, but it was true for these people who felt half-formed and opaque to me with no discernible edge or interesting bits. Worst of all, they were different in ways that made no difference. They’d insist that they wanted to “change the world” and “it was all about the journey” and “money was not the goal.” Those were all lies, of course, made more problematic by the fact that these men were lying to themselves most of all. In contrast to the shark babies who tried to feign cuddly, Zuckerberg openly craved power and historical significance from the get-go.
Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.”
so, I just said: “But, go ahead.” And he did, driving himself at full speed, with me watching him crash. “It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” he said, though it is not, at least when it comes to Holocaust deniers. My producer, Eric Johnson, who was taping the podcast interview at Mark’s office at 1 Hacker Way—I kid you not—in Menlo Park, could not believe what Zuckerberg had said either and stifled a gasp.
Justification for Alex Jones being allowed to spread hateful disinformation on Facebook.
Zuckerberg’s comments blew up like a Roman candle across the world, and he emailed me, trying to clarify what he had said. “I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that,” he wrote, even though that was exactly what he had done. Still, Mark allowed Holocaust deniers to stay on the platform for two more years, when he decided that the platform should “prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust.”
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.
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.
Over the years, with increasing alarm, I watched idealistic young founders aiming to change the world with miraculous digital innovations become sloppy and careless Internet moguls due to ungodly financial windfalls. Even when presented with data that they were doing harm, they shrugged off the consequences of their inventions on the larger world. Worse still, they had started to play the victim. I had dubbed this trend “the grievance industrial complex,” which like the military industrial complex would swell to grotesque proportions over time.
I published my piece in September of 2013, and in early December, Twitter finally added its first woman director, Marjorie Scardino, the former CEO of the Pearson PLC. Getting to inclusivity was a painfully slow process, always hindered by the excuse that there was a “pipeline problem” and that the always male leaders needed to maintain “standards” of quality. The problem I had was that (a) the tech leaders themselves installed that pipeline; and (b) the word “standards” was never uttered when it came to those all-male operations that were spewing losses and hurtling toward ignominy.
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.
Immediately, we contacted top News Corp executives, including Rupert Murdoch, and requested that all the video and audio of Jobs’ appearances at our AllThingsD conferences be made free for anyone to listen to forever (on Apple iTunes, of course). The company owned all our intellectual property, so we were nervous it might gate some of the most substantial interviews of tech’s most important visionary in his prime years. To sell them on the idea, we described it as a “gift to humanity.” To our surprise, they complied.
WSJ after Steve Jobs’ death.
Walt and I had tried to make it work. We spent vast amounts of time meeting with various weasels—and Rupert weasels were a particularly noxious breed—bringing them ideas of how to expand. Our conference was always a reliable moneymaker, but it was too small and we needed reasonable investments to move into new and potentially more lucrative areas. While we offered a good plan, all the Dow Jones executives could seem to do was point out how well we were paid. “But that new revenue would never have existed without our ideas and ambition,” I told one who seemed particularly riveted to the big
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I had fully soaked up another trait of Silicon Valley: the need for next. I had done well by walking away many times before when I did not feel great about my career situation. And, once again, I had begun to hear the far-off warning bells that Nora Ephron wrote about so insightfully in Heartburn, her veiled novel recounting the breakup of her marriage with Carl Bernstein. Ephron wrote: “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.”
we were loath to make more great content and products for Dow Jones. In post-event surveys, D attendees ranked Walt’s and my rapport, our interviews, and even the food higher than our affiliation with the Wall Street Journal. This penny was beginning to drop with a lot of media figures, as it became clearer that you could build a powerful personal brand—and business—without a big media name behind you. Walt was a pioneer in this shift as he established trust with his readers directly.
summer of 2013, our latest contract was nearing an end, so Walt and I decided to hit the road and talk to a range of possible new investors.
The A listers all wanted to meet with us and we came away with these quick assessments: the New York Times (super nice folks, super arrogant, super old school); Hearst (interesting range of assets, odd corporate culture, unclear who actually made the decisions); the Atlantic (owner David Bradley was a spiffy gentleman, but we did not relish being tied to another rich dude who would control our fate); Bloomberg (the terminal was the only god there and we were but a shiny trinket for them to play with); Condé Nast (a snakier snake pit than Dow Jones, with a very weird proposal about “shadow”
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When Walt and I weighed all the variables, it became apparent that NBC News was offering the best deal and partnership. We liked the idea of linking with a national broadcast outlet, and both of us had previous contributor relationships that would be extended to our staff in new ways. We also thought these partners could help us with events, advertising, and marketing. As the second investor, we picked former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who had started a media-focused investment fund after he left Yahoo. Semel offered strong ties to Hollywood after his long career there. But mostly, we chose him
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It was clear that social polarization was happening due to tech, which is why I soon took to calling the social networking giant “antisocial media.” The violations of privacy had been obvious at Facebook from the early days and continued on. These breaches were always met with an after-the-fact apology by Zuckerberg or Sandberg. The “we’re so sorry” became a joke to some of the reporters who covered the company. Each month brought another instance of Facebook grabbing information from users without their permission, some regulator investigating it and perhaps levying a small fine. Rinse and
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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. They paid the ticket and continued with an ad-based business model that relies on getting and keeping the attention of users, and the ability to gather and mine data was critical.
Facebook’s violation of 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.”
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.
nothing, as I pointed out often, fueled engagement like enragement.
Zuckerberg kept yammering about “creating community,” while forgetting that nothing pulls a community together faster...
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I remember clearly that I unloaded on her about Zuckerberg making statements about important issues that might be inaccurate. There was no way, I said, without a proper and deep investigation, for anyone at Facebook to know the extent of the potential manipulation by those seeking to misinform for political gains. I added, if this turned out to be true, even in part, who would take responsibility for allowing it to happen? As someone deeply concerned about propaganda and its impact on our democracy, I was intense, especially when I added, “This is going to end very badly for Facebook.”
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Sheryl Sandberg.
The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos put it best in a piece about the reckoning coming for Big Tech, most especially Facebook, writing, “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.”
Trump—the greatest troll in social media, as I dubbed him—understood
Despite a tiny $5 billion in annual revenue, Twitter’s influence was often compared to Meta’s, which pulled in $116 billion in 2022. Twitter dominated the zeitgeist, populated by a coterie of celebrities, politicians, and media heavyweights all vying to be the dunk master of the platform. That title, eventually, went hands down to @realDonaldTrump, who used Twitter as a megaphone to become the world’s biggest troll.
Trump factor on Twitter. I watched in real time as his crass and cruel comments began to warp politics. He tweeted openly racist and antisemitic sentiments, causing his supporters to retweet him in solidarity and his detractors to retweet him in anger. Either way, his lies and name-calling were spread. Trump had gamed the platform malevolently, much as Alex Jones had done on Facebook.
I wrote a New York Times column in October 2019 titled “Trump Is Too Dangerous for Twitter.” I called on the platform to ban him, predicting what could happen if it did not:
Trump loses the 2020 election and tweets inaccurately the next day that there had been widespread fraud and, moreover, that people should rise up in armed insurrection to keep him in office.
