Burn book
Review: “Burn Book”
From Murdoch to Musk: Frequently wrong, but never in doubt
Tech journalist Kara Swisher has long been the queen of snark. As anyone who has followed her work over the years knows, she dishes it out with relish. Her personal style is honed for the social media diss, the hectoring podcast interview and the gleefully in-your-face scoop, often delivered with a “told you so” smirk.
She honed her style in live onstage interviews, podcasts and social media. And, as a media entrepreneur in her own right: alongside former WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg she carved out new publishing and conferences businesses at the WSJ, something that brought her closer to the start-up founders she was covering.
A veteran chronicler of Big Tech, Swisher is both an insider and an outsider, having reported on tech's most prominent figures for so long she is known as both Silicon Valley’s “most feared” and “well-liked” journalist. She has attended baby showers for tech billionaires’ progeny and even had an impromptu sleepover with Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin at her mother’s apartment in New York City due to a malfunctioning elevator.
She is explicit, though, that the people she covers are not her friends. She has a profound distaste for the Valley’s “look-at-me narcissists, who never met an idea that they did not try to take credit for.”
Mark Zuckerberg, she writes, was “extraordinarily naive about the forces he had unleashed” and “was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it”. Elon Musk’s ranting on Twitter, which he renamed X, was “one long cry for help from a clearly troubled man” and made him “heinous”.
Over time, she went from merely asking these tech leaders what they were thinking and doing to telling them what she thought of their business deals and their products. And she says many wanted to hear her opinions.
There is no question that kind of wealth does inevitably warp tech titans as they navigate their frictionless world that allows them to go from private plane to armored car to a home office on an island.
But these days dunking on Zuckerbucks and Muskrat hardly counts as radical. That said, Swisher's brief, casual reporting on the life and personalities of the tech moguls she has come to know closely is a lively read. It also serves as an interesting report from the front lines of digital journalism by someone who helped shape how the medium has mutated.
By 2016, when Tech’s leading figures go to Trump Tower for a photo op with a man who seems to her the opposite of everything they once stood for, Swisher is disappointed but unsurprised by their “casual hypocrisy.” By 2020, she writes, she has become “less of a chronicler of the internet age and more of its cranky Cassandra,” warning of Tech’s increasingly unaccountable power.
Sillywood
The original “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was used to spread rumors and gossip at North Shore High School. Swisher’s version tells true stories about the men (they're nearly all men, she wryly notes) who dominate Silicon Valley. The book traces how the idiosyncrasies, blind spots, and enthusiasms of the tech leaders she covered over 30+ years have come to shape and dominate our world.
And Swisher is definitely direct. After all, many of the people she has covered — Elon Musk, Steve Jobs — are not nice people. Rather than mean, she seems fair, describing people accurately, which means if you are a mendacious fuck, you will be referred to as such.
Here's how Swisher contrasts a young Mark Zuckerberg with his idol, Steve Jobs:
Unlike the perpetually intriguing Jobs, Zuckerberg had almost no charm or game and it was painful how socially awkward he was then. He hemmed, he hawed, he looked anywhere but into your eyes.
Swisher spends much of the book calling out the white men who have, in many ways, created a culture that avoids responsibility, is largely sexist and racist, driven by greed, and unaccountable for the damage it has done to society at large. There are exceptions (praise be Dave Goldberg), and while some company executives got better over time (Gates, Jobs), most others worsened (Musk, Zuckerberg).
As she recounts interviews with everyone from Steve Jobs to Andrew Yang, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, Swisher reveals a disturbing pattern of most founders devolving from idealistic strivers to morally compromised, insulated rich people. This is important to care about because these are extraordinarily powerful individuals who wield massive global influence, even controlling activities in space and active war zones.
The focus on personality is relentless. The reader is left with an impression that, had it not been for Zuckerberg’s supposed character flaws or Musk’s tendency to get distracted by success, all might have turned out perfectly well with the tech revolution. Swisher doesn’t dwell on the broader forces at play that defined Silicon Valley.
Best of all for readers, throughout Burn Book, Swisher demonstrates her sly, idiosyncratic, breezy, sarcastic voice, making it eminently readable. And while the topics jump between professional, social, and personal memories, the threads weave together seamlessly. For a deeper investigation of the personalities that shaped the digital revolution or an explanation of how Silicon Valley has failed to deliver on its idealistic promises as its wealth and influence have grown, readers will have to look elsewhere.
About the author
Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway. She was also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, host of the Recode Decode podcast, and coexecutive producer of the Code conference. She was a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has also worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Burn Book is her third book.