I kept seeing Kara Swisher pop up in the various forms of media I consume to be interviewed. At first it was blatantly to promote this book. Then it was just to talk about how our tech oligarchs are making their oligarch status more blatant, with a quick mention about this book.
Rinse and repeat enough times and I figured I might as well get the audiobook from my library, especially since it was immediately available. Also, Swisher narrates the audiobook herself and does a good job.
I liked this book. I didn’t love it.
It was certainly interesting to hear Swisher talk about the emergence and growth of tech companies we now take for granted (such as Google.)
It was also interesting to hear Swisher talk about some of the technologies that were emerging as she started her career while I was still in high school and college. She talks about a lot of the tech features I used without giving any thought to where they came from, who created them, or what innovations they were working on creating next, much less how their business was structured or valued.
It goes without saying that there’s a lot of name dropping in this book, but I didn’t think it ever felt like name dropping. Every person Swisher mentions, from Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, ends up feeling like a real person rather than a footnote in her book.
That’s not to say they’re all likeable or sympathetic—far from it— but we start to get a sense of them as three-dimensional human beings and to understand their motivations and how much they accomplished…at least in their professional lives if not their personal lives.
Swisher also talks about the perils of reaching billionaire status. She describes how these men (because they are almost exclusively men) surround themselves with yes-men as they become more successful, insulating themselves from any kind of criticism.
Yes, Musk gets a mention, and I would say he’s the exception to the rule of Swisher portraying these people as three-dimensional human beings.
From the beginning, Musk is portrayed as a fragile man baby who sees insults everywhere, but whose memory is as short as his temper. He’s portrayed as someone who will lash out at you one moment and cozy up to you the next.
I’d like to say it gave me some perspective on what he’s doing to deconstruct our government now, especially since that was a motivation for reading this book, but it didn’t. Turns out he’s still the fragile, defensive manbaby he always was.
This book is fine. I liked it as a brief history of Silicon Valley, as well as Swisher’s career, but I wouldn’t call it a must-read.