Kara Swisher has always lit fi res in her work. The provocateur has chronicled the egos and excesses of Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and now New York, making a habit of scorching its denizens. But somehow she’s still embraced by them. “They think I’m one of them sometimes, and that’s a mistake,” she says. One way she’s not like many of them? She gets it right. Swisher was smart enough to consider tech a worthwhile beat early on. She helped popularize podcasting and showed Big Media that live events were a path to growth. Now she does what she pleases. In her new memoir, Burn Book, which is just what it sounds like only more so, Swisher once again cuts those grotesquely wealthy, code-smart chuckleheads down to size. Elon Musk atop X is “a troll king at scale”; Peter Thiel is a “contrarian investor and persistent irritant.”
How does she manage that cockiness in the face of all that, well, cockiness? “I don’t have an inner critic. I don’t know why,” says the pundit, whose latest podcast, On with Kara Swisher, features smart conversations with smart people (Ava DuVernay, Liz Cheney, Sam Altman). “And I don’t listen to other people either.” She credits her self-confidence at least in part to being gay. The fact that people didn’t like her for that made them, to her, stupid and not worth listening to. To be a woman in a bro’s world is impressive. To be a queer person who cut her own path and created a powerful role for herself in that world? Next-level. —L.I.