Burn Book by Kara Swisher from early 2024 is a an interesting nonfiction account of the journalist's years covering tech and the people in it. The book is subtitled A Tech Love Story and in it, Swisher provides anecdotes of her time with people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and her late husband Dave Goldberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger, and Elon Musk.
While she writes fondly of some of her subjects, including Goldberg and Jobs, Swisher covers how many others as they become wealthy and famous go from normal to just plain weird. As people would accumulate power, they too often would become aggrieved, developing a victim complex. All the while there would be large amounts of self-congratulation and getting rich while trumpeting how it not about the money, but about changing the world.
On Zuckerberg Swisher notes his lack of concern about the consequences of his actions, as if it's ok for him to just learn on the fly, with no repercussions. She describes him as carelessly dangerous and writes about "the expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg."
In terms of her own biography, Swisher covers attending college at Georgetown, then journalism school at Columbia. At thirty-four years old, she moved to California to cover tech for the Wall Street Journal. She and Walt Mossberg put on the All Things Digital, later renamed Code, conferences, interviewing tech luminaries. It's definitely an interesting read that she provides with the book.
