Technology journalist Kara Swisher talks about Silicon Valley

Lifestyle

by larry getlen

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang received a text from technology reporter Kara Swisher during a board meeting asking about a decision made by the Yahoo board.

The problem was that this decision was made at that very meeting.

“His response was, ‘This literally happened in the boardroom. Who’s leaking information to you?'” Swisher says in his new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, published by Simon & Schuster. It is written in the middle).

“My reply? ‘Look to the left, look to the right. The whole room.’

Swisher has been covering the technology industry since the early 1990s. Because she understood its importance early on, she was able to get an inside look into the professional and often personal lives of the now-iconic moguls who made it all happen.

In 1999, a conversation with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was preparing to become a father for the first time, prompted him to ask the LGBT Swisher, a mother of four, about how lesbians have children. started talking about it. She guided him through the sperm donation and insemination process and recalled his interest and comfort in the subject.

“At one point he asked me why I was using an anonymous donor instead of someone like him that I knew,” Swisher wrote. “It was never an offer, but I joked that although he was rich, he was short and bald.”

Swisher also wrote about how Bill Gates spoke glumly during a live interview with rival Steve Jobs in 2007.

After Jobs said on stage that working with Microsoft was “like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell,” Gates became extremely depressed and later blurted out in response to a question backstage: Ta. I’m running through hell. ”

But Mr. Swisher was no stranger to the sensitive and anxious founder.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so sensitive that Swisher thought it was a joke when a staffer said he might have a panic attack and faint when speaking in public.

Mr. Swisher realized how true this was.

“As the sweat dripped down Mark Zuckerberg’s glued face, I thought he was going to tip over at my feet,” she writes of an early appearance of Zuckerberg. — Larry Getlen