An instant New York Times bestseller from award-winning journalist Kara Swisher Burn Book is a
“highly readable…bawdy brash and compulsively thought-provoking” ( Booklist starred review)
account of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it
instead. Part memoir part history Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most
powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg The Wall Street Journal ) this
is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom
in wealth creation in the history of the world. When tech titans crowed that they would “move
fast and break things ” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the
explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s she developed a long track record of
digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one
CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg
to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say
‘I hope Kara never sees this.’” While still in college Swisher got her start at The
Washington Post where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering
the nascent internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal joining with Walt
Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference as well as pioneering
tech news sites. Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades
right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovations that has both helped
and hurt our world. Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Bill Gates Sheryl Sandberg Bob Iger
Larry Page and Sergey Brin Meg Whitman Peter Thiel Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg are just
a few of whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and in Zuckerberg’s case literally. Despite
the damage she chronicles Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve
problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better more thoughtful
choices even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At
its heart this book is a love story to for and about tech from someone who knows it better
than anyone.
