Kara Swisher's memoir offers vivid, unflattering sketches of tech moguls

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

Author: Kara Swisher

Publisher: Piatkus

Pages: 320 

Price: Rs 510

During an interview early on in his career with journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, started to sweat profusely when questioned on the issue of privacy and “instant personalisation”.  Noticing his obvious discomfort, Ms Swisher suggested he take off his warm hoodie to cool down. An observer may think this was considerate advice but here comes the actual admission:  Offering this tip was not “entirely altruistic”. Ms Swisher did not want to smack Mr Zuckerberg’s baby face back to life in the event that he fainted on stage.

This incident and frank admission come from the Burn Book written by Ms Swisher.  It is a memoir in which she chronicles her time covering the tech industry in Silicon Valley since its early days in the 1990s.  The author has first-hand experience in dealing with tech titans, and in many instances, right from the time when they were  young, eager entrepreneurs and their startups were fledglings. At the outset, she acknowledges that “I know you came for stories about the tech billionaires like Elon and Mark and Sheryl and Peter and Jeff and Steve and Tim.”  She does not disappoint.  Through revealing observations, anecdotes, and email exchanges, Ms Swisher offers the reader vivid character sketches of some of the biggest tech moguls who now dominate the digital revolution.

Some of these portraits are acutely unflattering. In a memorable retelling of a meeting between Elon Musk and A G Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, Ms Swisher Kara notes that Mr Musk brought in a small stuffed monkey.  He went on to place the monkey on the table and also occasionally addressed it during their conversation.  She is keenly critical of Mr Musk, especially since his takeover of Twitter, and woefully muses that it is only a question of time before he turns into another Howard Hughes.

Jeff Bezos is not spared either.  She calls Mr Bezos feral and notes that he “would eat my face off if that is what he needed to do to get ahead”.  She has nicknames for a select few as well: For instance, Robert Thomson (CEO of NewsCorp) is the naughty vicar.  I’ll allow the reader to discover other labels in the book; but if your preference is for vapid, anodyne tags, search elsewhere.  Ms Swisher even goes to the extent of devising a novel metric termed as the Prick to Productivity Ratio (P2P) to strengthen her assessments of powerful people and shares her calculations for the likes of Messrs Jobs, Gates and Musk.

She is swift in calling attention to the culture of kidulting prevalent in the tech industry through catchy vignettes.  She recounts an instance when she was asked to go down a twisty red children’s slide that connected two floors of the company Excite’s HQ. The founder was distinctly disappointed when she flatly refused. Although there is occasionally quite a lot of vitriol mixed with ink on the pages, Ms Swisher does take a break every so often to extend favourable views and kind words towards a small subset of tech folks. Mark Cuban, Bob Iger, Meg Whitman, and the “soft spoken” duo of Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella belong to this privileged group.

There are some poignant moments when Ms Swisher opens up on the untimely deaths of her father, Steve Jobs, Dave Goldberg and her own health scare, which also serve as reminders of the shortness of life and that there was little time to waste.  She also discusses the downsides and the unintended negative consequences of the tech sector such as violations of data privacy, proliferation of hate content, and gender bias, and laments that not enough has been done to cure society of these evils.  She points out that many of the tech moguls tend to play victim and prefer to project failures as assets, and that the tech industry is more of a “mirrortocracy” than a meritocracy. The growing concern around the unbridled development of artificial intelligence (AI) is underlined when she reveals an alarming admission by Sam Altman on the subject: “We are messing around with something we don’t truly understand”.

Despite the tart tone of the memoir, Ms Swisher insists her tryst with tech continues to be a love story and that “tech remains a vast canvas of promise”.  She even reaches out to ChatGPT to craft an ending for her book, which she then opts to dismiss.

The reader is left to marvel at Ms Swisher’s courage and her ability to take on such powerful personalities.  The book is well written and the author has managed to take the reader on an entertaining gallop across the tech landscape.  This industry has changed the world whether we like it or not, and through this book we get to encounter up close the foibles-and-all avatars of those who run it. Though not always pretty, it makes a compelling read for anyone interested in understanding this space.  A quote by Herman Mankiewicz that opens a chapter in the book stayed with me long after I had finished it.  It reads: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.  Don’t let this get around.”  It sounds like a serious call  to action.

The reviewer is an engineer and an MBA and a participant in the tech innovation domain