Over the course of her greater than three-decade profession as a chronicler of Silicon Valley, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has taken numerous executives to job. She as soon as famously made a younger Mark Zuckerberg sweat by means of his hoodie throughout an onstage interview. She grilled Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for over 50 minutes over whether or not the corporate faces any real competitors. She joked in 2012 that she was residing within the air vents above embattled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s workplace.
However extra not too long ago, seemingly no tech govt has obtained as a lot criticism from Swisher as Elon Musk. In her new memoir Burn E-book: A Tech Love Story, Swisher particulars the connection between the 2, which began off amicably between a star reporter and a valued supply and has since soured.
For Swisher, she sensed a shift in Musk across the begin of the pandemic. On the time, Musk chafed publicly at lockdown restrictions, being among the many first to order staff again to factories and workplaces. In September 2020, Musk even threatened to stroll out of an interview with Swisher when she pressed about COVID.
Till then, Musk had all the time had an impish streak in him that finally grew to become magnified, subsuming the remainder of his persona.
“Elon all the time had components like this—dumb memes, boob jokes and penis jokes—he appeared to love them,” Swisher tells Fortune. “I don’t care. If you wish to be 12 years outdated, I don’t know what to let you know. However that was like a small a part of his persona.”
Finally, as Musk’s conduct grew to become extra erratic in the previous couple of years, the connection between the 2 grew to become extra strained. It lastly broke down within the fall of 2022 when Musk despatched Swisher an electronic mail calling her “asshole” over what she says was a misinterpreted put up on X.
“If I did one thing assholish, I’d say so and I didn’t, so fuck you,” she says about Musk.
Musk has been the recipient of a few of Swisher’s harshest criticisms; she’s taken him to job with a stage of zeal that appears to belie a deeper emotional purpose for her frustration. Burn E-book lastly provides some perception as to what the reply is likely to be. The sting of getting interview requests rejected? A private dislike borne of the liberal Swisher and the conservative Musk’s more and more diverging political beliefs? No, as an alternative, it was one thing rather more healthful, but wounding: disappointment.
“There isn’t any doubt that Musk is a superb entrepreneur, maybe probably the most of this age, however he has additionally change into a misplaced trigger to me, and I’m not positive what he may do to show that round at this level,” Swisher writes. “With Musk, it appears like it’s only a query of time earlier than we enter the Howard Hughes— one other good wealthy man who curdled badly— chapter of his story. And, as heinous as Musk has change into, that end result is likely one of the saddest developments in my lengthy love story with tech.”
She speaks of Musk the way in which a disenchanted mentor or trainer may of an exceptionally shiny scholar who couldn’t fairly appear to keep away from getting despatched to the principal’s workplace. “The rationale I preferred him [Musk] is as a result of he thought huge,” Swisher says. “As I began overlaying these individuals, I saved pondering there’s a whole lot of actually good individuals engaged on small concepts. Our time requires our Thomas Edisons to be somewhat extra artistic than making a dry cleansing supply service.”
Swisher is correct that Musk does seem to have a desire for tackling complicated issues, somewhat than developed client purposes. Presently Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a business house exploration agency he cofounded, and of Tesla, credited with being the primary automotive firm to convey electrical autos to the mass market. He’s additionally the founding father of Boring Firm, an engineering agency making an attempt to construct underground tunnels for mass transportation.
“No person had a portfolio like that,” Swisher says of Musk. “So I might naturally be drawn to somebody who was pondering huge in a small-minded group of people that all they have been taken with is their subsequent billion {dollars}.”
Swisher calls Musk’s work to popularize electrical autos at Tesla “a dream.” She was initially open-minded about his now defunct Hyperloop plan for subterranean public transportation. “What a good suggestion to go below cities,” she says. “Can we try this now?”
Even Musk’s zaniest concepts have based a begrudging champion in Swisher. “I can’t consider I’m saying this, however I consider we must be a multi-planet species, too, as a result of if we’re going to depend on this planet, we’re fucked,” Swisher says, referring to Musk’s longstanding want to see mankind stay on different planets.
Earlier than Musk bought Twitter, since renamed X, Swisher had him on a shortlist of executives she thought may flip the platform round. Twitter, Swisher says, was the “most emotionally fucked up place you’d ever seen.” The platform all the time had notable cultural significance, however punched far under its weight commercially. In 2021, Twitter was unprofitable with $5 billion in income. In the meantime, its rival Meta did $117 billion and $39 billion in internet revenue. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as soon as memorably referred to Twitter as a “clown automotive that fell right into a gold mine.”
“I had hopes that Musk, girded by his don’t-give-a-fuck persona, countless wealth, and deep curiosity in reworking the media, could possibly be the proprietor to assist Twitter notice its potential,” Swisher writes in Burn E-book. “Trying again now, I used to be clearly and utterly fallacious.”
Within the fall of 2022, shortly after Elon Musk closed his buy of Twitter, Swisher (as she is wont to do occasionally) provided Musk some recommendation about what she thought was the correct route for the corporate. She even despatched him a proof of idea from her personal expertise utilizing Twitter Areas, in accordance with Burn E-book.
“Be entertaining (TikTok), helpful (Fb, however more and more much less so) and should have (you’ll be able to’t get it anyplace else),” she wrote Musk. “In any other case, it’s only a noisy place the place idiots rule— that’s wonderful if you wish to make a scorching mess, however it’s not a enterprise.”
However as Musk’s antics continued, Swisher’s personal plans for Twitter went stomach up. “I had gotten a really profitable promoting deal that—the minute he began performing like a jackass—blew up,” she says.
