‘Burn Book’ torches tech titans in veteran reporter’s tale of love and loathing in Silicon Valley

Technology is so pervasive and invasive that it’s polarizing people, producing feelings of love and loathing for its devices, online services and the would-be visionaries behind them.

Longtime Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher unwraps how we got to this point in her incendiary memoir, “Burn Book,” coming out Tuesday, an exposé that also seeks to avert technological calamity on the perilous road still ahead.

Swisher skewers many of the once-idealistic tech moguls who, when she met them as entrepreneurs decades ago, promised to change the world for the better but often chose a path of destructive disruption instead. And along the way, they amassed staggering fortunes that have disconnected them from reality.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who broke into a sweat during an on-stage interview with Swisher in 2010, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who once talked to her regularly before cutting off communications after he bought Twitter in 2022, are painted in the harshest light.

“If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing,” Swisher writes in her 300-page book.

That’s one of the milder critiques in what’s a mostly scathing takedown by one of the most respected and feared reporters covering technology. Her reputation is such that Swisher has become as synonymous with Silicon Valley as the famous entrepreneurs who shaped it since she began covering the industry in the 1990s.

CEOs, including Zuckerberg and Musk, regularly granted her exclusive interviews, fed her scoops and sometimes even secretly called her for advice, according to her book. When the HBO series, “Silicon Valley,” needed someone to play an influential reporter in an episode, Swisher was cast as herself — a role she still regularly fills as a technology commentator on major TV networks.

Swisher no longer resides in Silicon Valley. She moved to Washington, DC, a few years ago, mostly because that’s where her wife works, but also because she was feeling a need to escape what had become an increasingly toxic and insular scene.

But she has remained plugged into — and worried — about what is happening with technology, particularly with the accelerating rise of artificial intelligence and its potential for causing even more damage than she thinks has already been done by social media, smartphones and other products that haven’t been tightly regulated.