Free Audio Book : Burn Book, By Kara Swisher

A blend of personal recollections and historical accounts, Burn Book is an indispensable record of the tech industry’s most influential figures. This is the much-anticipated insider’s tale of contemporary Silicon Valley and the largest wealth generation event in global history.

As tech giants boasted about their intent to “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving at a faster pace and breaking stories. During her coverage of the digital sector’s surge in the early 1990s, she established a solid reputation for unearthing and reporting the truths about this new world order. Her consistent exclusives led one CEO to accuse her of “eavesdropping in the heating ducts” and caused Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once remark: “It’s a running gag in the Valley when people draft memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never lays eyes on this.’”

While still a college student, Swisher began her career at The Washington Post, where she was one of the few journalists interested in covering the emerging Internet. She later worked for The Wall Street Journal, partnering with Walt Mossberg to launch the revolutionary D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news websites.

Over three decades, Swisher has interviewed every significant figure in tech, right at the time they oversaw a burst of innovation that has both benefited and harmed our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few of the individuals whom Swisher made perspire—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the harm she documents, Swisher remains hopeful about tech’s potential to address issues rather than merely cause them. She urges the industry to make wiser, more considerate decisions, even as a new suite of potent AI tools stand ready to transform the world once more. At its core, this book is a love letter to, from, and about tech from someone who understands it better than anyone else.