Tech Writer Kara Swisher Blasts the 'Boy-Kings'

Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher is out with a highly anticipated memoir about her life and the internet revolution she covered from its earliest days. Burn Book is released Tuesday, but early coverage provides a taste:

• Excerpt: You can read one via Intelligencer here. Included is a moment when she warns Washington Post CEO Don Graham of an up-and-coming site called Craigslist, which she correctly predicted would cripple newspapers' vital classified ads. "You charge too much, the customer service sucks, it's static, and most of all, it doesn't work," she recalls telling him. The newspaper "will disappear as an analog product, since it is a perfect target for digital destruction. You're going to die by the cell and not even know it until it's over and you're dead on the ground." The "affable" CEO smiled and responded, "Ouch."
• Boy-kings: Swisher goes after the industry bigwigs in particular. "Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction," she writes, per the Washington Post. "But it really happened." And Axios calls attention to this line: "There is no question that kind of wealth does inevitably warp tech titans as they navigate their frictionless world that allows them to go from private plane to armored car to a home office on an island."

• The money: Swisher tells CNN that tech CEOs always maintained that it wasn't about capitalism, it was about creating a better world. But "everything they then did facilitated the bad outcomes, whether it was making teen girls lose their self-esteem or using data without permission, or moving into monopolistic tendencies—everything they did, it became really clear to me, and pretty quickly, that it was all about the money. It was always all about the money."
• Forgiving Jobs: Swisher tells Steve Inskeep of NPR that Steve Jobs lied to her and other tech reporters about working on a phone. "Why should he tell us the truth about that? I wasn't as offended [as] other reporters, who were like, 'He lied to us.' I'm like, 'Oh, you're kidding. Shockeroo. Like, why would he tell us? He's working on a phone. He doesn't [want] anyone to know.' You know, Marc Andreessen lied to me about leaving AOL. They lie about things little and big."
• A criticism: The book is great in parts, writes Adrian Chen in a review at the New York Times, particularly when Swisher is writing about her life as a young journalist. But the memoir's "fatal flaw, the reason it can never fully dispel the whiff of opportunism that dooms any memoir, is that Swisher never shows in any convincing detail how her entanglement with Silicon Valley clouded her judgment."
• No index: In what Axios sees as a "final very Kara touch," she writes: "There is no index, people. So, you have to read the whole book all the way through to see if you're in it." Many of the titans likely won't be happy—she says Mark Cuban might be an exception—assuming they read it. "Do they read?" she asks CNN. "I don't know. I don't think they read. They'll have their assistants summarize it for them, and then it won't hurt as much. I don't know."

(More Kara Swisher stories.)