Kara Swisher is still drawn to tech despite her disappointments with the industry
Kara Swisher is a conversationalist.
She begins one thought and is reminded of another. She talks of one of the tech leaders she has interviewed over the years, and mentions another. The conversation is not aimless. She eventually connects all the circuits, offering a complex picture of how she processes the world.
Swisher's memoir Burn Book recounts more than three decades covering the tech industry as a beat reporter, analyst, columnist, podcaster and TV personality. She partnered with fellow journalist Walt Mossberg to lead the way in hosting tech conferences — where they would interview billionaires on stage. And she says many of those billionaires would also talk directly with her in private.
Over time, she writes in Burn Book, 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.
Swisher is still fond of many tech moguls — even subtitling her memoir A Tech Love Story. For her forthcoming book tour, she has asked many tech leaders to interview her on stage, and she told me she intends to turn those interviews into podcasts.
When it comes to other tech executives, she is disillusioned.
As we spoke at NPR last week, the conversation moved rapidly from topic to topic and mogul to mogul: Elon Musk of Tesla; Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Bill Gates of Microsoft; investor Mark Andreessen; and the late Steve Jobs, whose products at Apple included the iPhone.
A portion of our long conversation was broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition. But a few minutes didn't capture the full flavor. So this page offers a longer portion of the interview, in both text and audio, where Swisher details her views on the tech world and her disappointments with it.
The reason why I hold [tech leaders] to a higher standard is because they said it themselves: "We're going to change the world. We're going to make the world a better place. We're going to flatten organizations. We're
