Kara Swisher’s 2024 Election Warning: ‘Toxic’ Tech Companies Have Only Gotten Worse Since 2016

Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has been covering the internet since before the beat existed. In her new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, she traces the rise of Silicon Valley and her own career reporting on its most powerful players, from the days of the Mosaic browser to the AI apocalypse looming in the not-too-distant future.

Over the course of her career, which Swisher discussed at length on this week’s episode of the Press Club podcast, she has evolved from tech idealist to one of the industry’s most prominent critics. In Burn Book, she writes that by 2020, she had become “less of a chronicler of the internet age and more of its cranky Cassandra.” She’s particularly tough on Facebook and its baby-faced CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the platform’s role in fueling extremism and spreading disinformation during the 2016 election. Facebook got slapped with a $5 billion fine over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which Swisher dismissed as a “parking ticket” for the tech behemoth. With the 2024 election on the horizon, Swisher thinks social media platforms have only gotten worse: more unaccountable, more rapacious.

Swisher’s book covers the arc of her career covering Silicon Valley. After a stint at The Washington Post in the 1990s, Swisher packed up her bags and drove across country to San Francisco, where she started covering the nascent tech scene for The Wall Street Journal. She reported on the industry’s booms and busts, of which there were many, and the men, mostly men, who would soon be kings, from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg. After launching a successful events business with Journal colleague Walt Mossberg within Dow Jones, they exited the stodgy old mothership to make a go of it on their own. The next business, Recode, with its famed Code conferences, would prove a mighty success. Now, Swisher is the host of podcasts On With Kara Swisher and Pivot with Scott Galloway, a contributing editor to New York magazine, and a CNN contributor.

In a wide-ranging conversation on this week’s Press Club, Swisher discussed what she fears most about 2024, her career as a reporter and then as a media entrepreneur, the future of the media industry, how to start a media company in today’s climate, whether cable news can survive in a post-linear world, and her relationship with tech and media titans from Rupert Murdoch to Elon Musk.

Subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: I want to talk about some big media news. Ronna McDaniel, you may have heard, was dumped by NBC this week about three minutes into her new gig as a contributor. I want your take on that whole saga. What did you think of it? You’re a member of the contributor class yourself.

Kara Swisher: I was a contributor to NBC in fact. I know [NBC executives] Cesar [Conde] and Rebecca [Blumenstein] and Carrie [Budoff Brown] and Rashida [Jones] pretty well. It was a bad decision on their part. I’m kind of perplexed as to why they would have done something like that without thinking of the repercussions. I just don’t understand it.

I have now a contributor contract, full disclosure, with CNN. But I did have one with NBC for years. I wasn’t involved in any of their machinations, as happens at all these companies. But it seemed completely boneheaded. I don’t know what else to say. That you would think that this wouldn’t be controversial given her history? It’s great to have Republicans or people you disagree with or whatever, on these networks — MSNBC’s more left-leaning, obviously. But that one, I don’t understand why. It’s sort of like signing a deal with Marjorie Taylor Greene. What’s the point? They’re gonna lie. Or they lied before.

So it just puts the reporters in a terrible position. And that’s what they did. They had to pull it back. I just don’t even understand how you’d make a decision like that.

I’m surprised they didn’t consult, you know, Rachel Maddow at the very least, or [Joe] Scarborough or Chuck Todd or any of their numerous anchors for what they think about this, and will you put them on? She’s a particularly controversial person. They’re going to try like, oh, cancel culture, this and that.

But this woman defended election denial. Very clearly. And attacked reporters very clearly. And she shouldn’t be rewarded with a contributor thing. If she did it on the left, I’d say the same thing. It’s nonsense. It’s nonsensical that they hired her. So I don’t know what got into them.

Digitization is a big theme in your book. It starts with you marveling at the wonders of the internet and presciently predicting that “anything that can be digitized would be.” Early on you were warning Don Graham, who was the CEO of The Washington Post, that his business was about to be wiped out by the internet.

I said he had some worries. I’d been covering retail and I saw Walmart come in as local retailers were decimated. And so that was already a worry. And by the way, Walmart was a highly technical company; they use technology quite effectively. So I was worried that there were some trends happening that were problematic. Not just display advertising, but there were three legs of the stool there, which was subscriptions, display advertising, and classifieds. The first two were under siege and the last one was too because of free news all over the internet. So it was a growing concern of mine to be at a newspaper whose economics were based on trends that were under attack rather significantly.

In the two decades since, how would you explain the ways tech came to decimate the media industry?

I think they didn’t recognize, they thought tech would be a tool, like it was a telephone or something like that, when in fact tech is media. Tech had become, slowly, media and they’d gotten very interested. They should have noticed when Google was copying books, right? Or YouTube was stealing videos.

This was not a tool. This was a weapon that these tech companies were using. And they were very interested in media, in having the media, but not paying for the media, essentially. And that goes on to today. And they weren’t interested in paying for the costs and problems that come up with media, such as what happened on January 6th. They don’t mind just distributing everything and pretending they’re a telephone company, when in fact they’re a media company.

And I’ve never bought the line that they weren’t, and I never thought they were our friend. So that was one of my things. I used the famous Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” and I kept telling media people: It’s a cookbook. They want to eat you. They’re here to eat you. I don’t think it was particularly prescient to see what they were up to because they did it from the beginning. They always stole. They were like rapacious information thieves almost from the get go.

The idea that they would be altruistic or —

Oh, it’s nonsense.

You quote Bob Iger at one point saying in an interview, “You have no real ability to ward off disruption or to avoid it.” Do you think that what happened to the media industry was an inevitability, or were there ways media could have worked with tech to avoid the problems that we’re seeing now?

They could have merged with tech. That AOL-Time Warner deal was actually the right deal if you think about it. It just was out of sync. But technically it was the right thing to do, is to bring together media and a tech company, and when they were at a much more prone position. And they did different deals, MSNBC was started because it’s Microsoft. People forget. That’s the right idea.

But I think the tech people soon realized they could take everything. Why get the cow when you can get the milk for free, that kind of thing. It’s a terrible old term, but that’s really what happened there. Tech continued to improve at media while media did not continue to improve in tech. And that was really a problem. It would have been hard because the stock price differential, the ability to reward your employees with stock, and the zooming stock valuations gave them a lot of purchase to do things. Buy things, reward their employees, and everything else. There was no way tech people were going to come over to media rather than vice versa.

You also quote Steve Jobs in your book telling Rupert Murdoch that “The media industry is kind of screwed since the best technologists are working for people like me and not you.”

That’s correct. You just said it. I don’t have to say it any clearer. He’s correct. Why would they work for Rupert Murdoch? Because they didn’t value technology at media companies. Same thing with government. It doesn’t value technology. They think of them like a help desk, as opposed to a real way to transform their businesses. And I can see why they did it. Even up to today, I was with a pretty major executive, and he’s like, “content is king.” And I was like,”of a minor small country, you know, northern Latvia, I guess.”

But no, it’s not. Because content is everything, Instagram is content, TikTok is content. It’s entertainment today. They weren’t able to shift quickly enough from what they were making to what people wanted. TikTok, you can spend hours looking at it. That’s what media is. Is it Oppenheimer? No. And by the way, Oppenheimer did rather well. But you can only make so many Oppenheimers and you can make a lot of TikToks, especially when you’re getting other people to make your content for you. Where there are no costs. All that is no cost to TikTok, except for loading it up and sending it out.

Speaking of Rupert Murdoch, you write in the book that he is “old school when it comes to women.” What was your relationship with him like? What was it like working with him at The Wall Street Journal?

Well, you know, I already had some problems with them as a person because I think he’s one of the most single destructive characters in modern media history, in modern American history. Someone told me this, and I agree with it: gerrymandering, Fox News, and social media have really done a number on American society. I thought he was a hugely destructive personality. And cynical. He just was your old school media mogul. He never knew my name for a long, long time. He knew Walt [Mossberg’s] name. I was just the girl that was with him. He’s an old guy. So what do you want? I don’t get particularly offended by it. That was just the way he was. Focused on his sons rather than his much smarter daughter. I’m sorry to tell you, she is. You know, things like that. It’s like Succession. He’s Brian Cox in Succession.

You ended up leaving the Journal and then had a lot of success as a media entrepreneur. How do you start a media company in this current climate when Google and Meta have devoured the business model?

We had an advertising-based business and that was fine for the time. But now I think a lot of people have had a lot of success with subscriptions. There just might be too many of them. That’s all. But I think the people are trying different things, and I appreciate that. We just didn’t have the opportunity at the time to do so. We should have done subscriptions, but we couldn’t have at the time there was there was no mechanism that was easy to do it that way. And people weren’t in the frame of mind to do it.

Right now our podcast business is all advertising and we’re doing just fine. We’re not even contemplating subscription unless we do something special. But some people are and some people can sign big deals with Spotify or things like that. You know, you just have to be very small and very nimble and and cognizant of costs and revenues and how they fall into line. You can’t lose money. So we did the combination of advertising, events, which was sponsorships and also ticket prices. We never did subscriptions. We should have.

The new crop of media outlets that are having success are fairly targeted to a niche of affluent professionals. Places like Puck.

It’s not that different from a magazine subscription, right? It just isn’t. There used to be a very thriving newsletter business that would do very well. Like Cook Report in politics or whatever. There was one for fashion, there was one for advertising. They used to do rather well. Computer Week used to do really well. It’s an iteration on the same thing. I don’t think it’s changed. Some of them are advertising-based. When you can make the money in advertising, you should. But now with digital advertising being owned by Facebook and Google, that’s a really tough road to hoe, if you’re doing that.

The next big disruption for the news business is the collapse of the linear model in cable news. Do you worry about what that’s going to do to these major TV companies, or do you think they’ll survive the leap into streaming?

They’re trying. I don’t really care if they survive or not, that’s not my business. It’s a very expensive leap. They made fun of Netflix when they were doing it, and then they jumped in. And they should have jumped in, it’s just costly. They have to have great IP, they’ve got to have great programing. It’s the new broadcast essentially. But it’s a subscription business. And there’s some advertising, now Netflix added advertising. It’s just taking the TV model and shifting it slightly from a spray and pray model to a very targeted model. They all have to do it. It’s not like there’s a choice here. There’s only one path through, which is this. And so they’ve got to make the best version of this possible.

You’re a contributor at CNN. Are you optimistic about the future there? Do you like Mark Thompson and his plans of the network?

I like him a lot. I don’t know what they are. He doesn’t consult me.

You’ve read the memos, though? His manifestos about the future.

Yeah, I guess he has to do those things. I don’t really read them. He’s right. If you want to boil it down, it’s ‘We’ve got to get into digital. Digital is the most important thing. Stop focusing on the broadcast network. I don’t think he’s abandoning the broadcast. It’s stupid to abandon the broadcast network.

There have been some anxieties inside CNN that he might be forsaking the TV model for digital.

Oh well. Things change. What do you want? I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry. We’re not riding one-wheeled bicycles anymore. I don’t know what to tell you. Kids aren’t watching broadcast news and ratings are down. So what are you going to do? It doesn’t mean you can’t create a great product in a different system. That’s all. And you have to change costs. You can’t be paying anchors $20 million unless you understand their value. I’m very valuable to CNN for the money they pay me. I’m sure of it. But the money they pay some people, it’s going to be hard.

And that was an old model, this anchor model. And and sometimes it works. I would probably assume Rachel Maddow is very valuable to MSNBC. And you can justify the high sums you pay her. If you make a lot of money, you better be bringing in a lot of money, and it should be trackable. And that’s just it.

Whenever I built a business, if I make $10 million and I cost $3 million, I’m very valuable and I will be paid that value. I think what’s happened is we just had a system that doesn’t work anymore. And now we have another one, that’s all. Costs and revenue have to come into line. I don’t think it’s that complex. And even if they’re anxious, if the ratings are declining and money’s not coming in, I don’t know what to tell you. The grocery store doesn’t get that. It’s a grocery store. It’s the same thing with a grocery store or an insurance company or anybody.

When you look at the projected revenues from streaming, they’re just far smaller than linear. I think that’s going to be a wake up call for lot of people over the next couple of years.

Oh well. Guess what? Things change. I don’t know what to say. It’s just that’s what happens. Again, I’m sure the horse and buggy business was quite good until it wasn’t. That’s the way it is, that’s the way everything is with economics. On the other hand, the reason I did sign with [CNN] is because I thought the “cable is dead” nonsense was also nonsense. You have a global information network that’s on televisions across the world. Really? You can’t make a business out of that? If you can’t, then you shouldn’t be in business. That’s my feeling. Everyone has to be very reductive, like it’s over! Well, something’s over. So what are you going to do to attract users? Even if it’s a small user base, you can make quite a bit of money off that small user base. I don’t think it’s dead in that regard. I don’t think broadcast is dead. I think it’s changing.

I like the optimism.

It’s not optimistic. I’m just a business person. How can you not make money? How can you not make money off a global information network with the best brand in the world for news, one of the best brands? If you can’t, you should go home. Don’t be in the business.

I want to ask you about an innovative tech entrepreneur who has this really promising startup. It’s called Truth Social. It has about $3 million in annual revenue and it’s valued at $9 billion.

[Laughs]. My podcast makes much more than that.

But is your podcast valued at $9 billion?

No, it is not. But I certainly make more revenue, and I make profits, compared to Truth. Literally, Pivot makes 2 or 3 times as much in revenue.

Can you explain what’s going on with Truth Social? And is there any chance that Trump actually makes money from this?

There’s nothing. It’s a scam. It’s not a business. There’s no business here. There’s zero business. It doesn’t have any advertising business. It doesn’t have any revenue prospects. It has costs, I assume. And it’s just a way to funnel money to Donald Trump. It’s a scam. It’s a meme stock. And so people will buy it either to funnel money to him because he might be president, or it’s just a game that people are playing like GameStop. GameStop wasn’t worth what it was worth it.

Anything’s worth what people decide to pay for it, so I guess it’s worth that. That’s what people are paying for it. It’s not worth that, but people are paying for it. And so there’s no prospect of this making money. Why are we even bothering to pretend. It’s just a Ponzi scheme. All these MAGA people, they’re just buying it. From an economic underpinnings point of view, there’s zero. It loses $49 million. It earns only $3 million. I was shocked that it was just $3 [million].

You said you think that Elon Musk is not being straightforward about supporting Donald Trump. Do you think that he’s going to get into the 2024 race to any real extent beyond posting?

Why are we pretending he’s not? He says if the Republicans don’t win, it will be doom. Well, the Republican candidate is Donald Trump. He’s just playing games. I mean, c’mon, stop it. Stop pretending. Everyone always goes, oh, well, he hasn’t said anything. I’m like, he just said if the Republicans don’t win, we’re in for a world of doom. So that would mean Donald Trump. I don’t know why we let them play games with us like this.

How do you explain Elon Musk’s transition from a very successful entrepreneur with a bunch of successful ventures in disparate fields to essentially now a troll on on Twitter?

I can’t explain how my mother was transformed from a normal conservative to a crazy Trumper. I can’t explain it. I don’t know, cults? The deleterious effects of too many people praising you because you’re rich. He’s been radicalized. I mean, it happens. There’s a very good podcast, Rabbit Hole, by Kevin Roose that will explain to you what happened to a kid. It’s the same thing. You get pulled down these rabbit hole conspiracies and it overtakes. Just because it’s him doesn’t mean it didn’t happen here. He’ll say that he’s in the matrix in his mind woke up finally. But whatever. Okay. I think when you’re really rich, people tell you you’re right all the time. I have a lot of kids. And if you raise kids with with sugar and constant television, you certainly get a particular kind of kid back.

Have you spoken to anyone at X? Linda Yaccarino?

She doesn’t speak to me. She told people I sandbagged her at that disastrous interview she did at Code. Maybe she’s just not that good at her job. Maybe that’s what that is. That’s all. It could be it. It’s very simple. She was expecting a big, hey, go girl interview and she got a regular interview. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t be a CEO. That’s my feeling on anybody. If you want that title, you need to deal with that title.

She seems to have lasted longer than a lot of people expected in that role. Though I did notice that when Don Lemon got his contract canceled by Elon, he did not tell Linda.

I wonder if she’s the actual CEO? She’s not. Come on. It’s such nonsense. She’s just there to be a heat shield. Whatever. She likes it. She thinks he’s great. That’s good. Maybe she’ll make some money. I think he’s ruined her career, but she doesn’t care what I think. She can do whatever she wants. If she makes a lot of money, good luck to her.

You write extensively about the dangers of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in your book, particularly with regard to the role the platform played in fueling extremism and misinformation in the 2016 election. Looking forward to 2024, what most worries you about the upcoming election?

I think just an acceleration of the tools that radicalized people. I think these tools, these AI tools are getting better and better and the ability to target people more carefully. The ability to create fakes and confusion and take news and make it not news. The whole panoply of things that have happened before, but at an accelerated basis. Also the ability of these companies to not be regulated or do content moderation.

I think constant repetition of anti-Semitic remarks online is radicalizing. It just is. We already have a problem with anti-Semitism, it’s been around since forever. But when you’re able to radicalize and flood the zone, people stew in toxic waste and they become toxic. These tools are designed to incite and enrage you. And that’s what they do. You wonder why you died of lung cancer when you smoke cigarettes? I don’t, because you did.

Do you think tech platforms have gotten any better since 2016?

No. They’ve gotten worse. They’re doing less content moderation than ever. They don’t care. They they’ve seen that the government has no ability to control them. It’s a cost. To fix this is expensive. They don’t want to spend the money. And why should they if they’re not made to?

You started your career as a reporter. You then launched a conference with Walt Mossberg and The Wall Street Journal. What pushed you to make that transition out of just being a reporter and being more of an entrepreneur?

I was always an entrepreneur while I was a reporter. I left The Wall Street Journal because I just didn’t like the way they were running things. And instead of bellyaching and saying, oh my bosses suck, which is kind of a waste of my time, I made something else. I just felt like there was no risk to me to try something fresh and new. If it failed, it failed. If it worked it worked. I didn’t care.

That’s what being an entrepreneurs is like: I have an idea and I’m going to try to make money from it. And that was really all it took. I don’t particularly like a newsroom where you sit around and complain about the people you’re working for. I don’t want to be that person. I had some ideas and they weren’t going to do them, so I did it myself. I think it’s a better way to live.

You fielded some offers from outside journalism, from these tech companies. I’m wondering what the best offer you got was and whether you were tempted to take it.

None of them. I got one from AOL early on. It would have been worth hundreds of millions. All of them would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Google, I think it was an editorial director job. They were all in the editorial area, and I didn’t think they had any editorial. Amazon, Facebook. I probably would have done at least $100 million for each of them. If not much more. I just didn’t want to work for them. Again, I didn’t want to work for the media companies, but I definitely didn’t want to work for the tech companies. You can say that was stupid. Sure, if money was my object. I would have liked to have $500 million. That would have been nice. I also bought Bitcoin early and I lost my bitcoin wallet or whatever.

You write that it at one point, you became “too much of a creature of Silicon Valley.” That is a criticism you sometimes face, that you were too credulous of these tech founders for too long, and to slow to realize how dangerous they were. What do you make of that?

I think it’s a lot of people I competed against who I beat all the time. We wrote about Google’s privacy issues in the early 2000s. In 1999, I wrote a piece about it. I wrote about all the stock valuations. I wrote about Uber. We were on the forefront of writing about the problems at Uber very early. We wrote about the Ellen Pao thing more than anybody else, about the problems of gender discrimination. We were probably the only one writing about that from an early time. When that Facebook fine, happened, $5 billion, I wrote a piece calling it a parking ticket. When Facebook was overvalued we wrote a piece about that.

I don’t know what to say. Here’s what it’s from. I thought Elon Musk was pretty fucking cool at the beginning. That was it. And he was. I’m sorry. He was. And if you’re dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs that are doing digital dry cleaning services and someone comes along and is going to change the way we do space, you’re going to be interested in them. I don’t apologize for it.

But I certainly turned around well before everybody else when he started coming off the rails. I think it’s an insult to all the AllThingsD people. Peter Kafka, tough reporting. Mike Isaac, he went on to The New York Times. If we were so credulous, how is it that they became some of the greatest reporters? Kurt Wagner just wrote a book on Twitter. He worked for us. He had a dozen really amazing reporters who did astonishing work. And a lot of it was very truthful about the tech industry. We also did a series of interviews, the year I made Mark Zuckerberg sweat. Oh, I’m really nice to him. That was nice. And then I did the 2018 interview about the Holocaust deniers. I was the first person to call them digital arms dealers. I don’t know what to say. Fine. I’m really nice. I call them digital arms dealers. That’s super nice. I said Google were thugs. I don’t know what to say. But I wasn’t unfair. They would have liked me to kill these people. And I’m not in the business of killing them. I’d like to see their work against mine. Fine. Let’s have a comparison. There’s no comparison. There isn’t.

I want to name some figures, and I would like you to describe them in one word. Jeff Bezos.

Feral.

Mark Zuckerberg.

Naive.

Bill Gates.

That’s a good one. I don’t know what to call him, he’s changed so much. I’m sorry. I don’t have a word for him. Aggressive.

Steve Jobs.

Visionary.

Elon Musk.

Deeply disappointing.

Rupert Murdoch.

Uncle Satan.

Kara Swisher.

I did a good job.

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