Over the course of her more than three-decade career as a chronicler of Silicon Valley, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has taken countless executives to task. She once famously made a young Mark Zuckerberg sweat through his hoodie during an onstage interview. She grilled Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for over 50 minutes over whether the company faces any genuine competition. She joked in 2012 that she was living in the air vents above embattled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s office.
But more recently, seemingly no tech executive has received as much criticism from Swisher as Elon Musk. In her new memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, Swisher details the relationship between the two, which started off amicably between a star reporter and a valued source and has since soured.
For Swisher, she sensed a shift in Musk around the start of the pandemic. At the time, Musk chafed publicly at lockdown restrictions, being among the first to order workers back to factories and offices. In September 2020, Musk even threatened to walk out of an interview with Swisher when she pressed about COVID.
Until then, Musk had always had an impish streak in him that eventually became magnified, subsuming the rest of his personality.
“Elon always had elements like this—dumb memes, boob jokes and penis jokes—he seemed to like them,” Swisher tells Fortune. “I don’t care. If you want to be 12 years old, I don’t know what to tell you. But that was like a small part of his personality.”
Eventually, as Musk’s behavior became more erratic in the last few years, the relationship between the two became more strained. It finally broke down in the fall of 2022 when Musk sent Swisher an email calling her “asshole” over what she says was a misinterpreted post on X.
“If I did something assholish, I’d say so and I didn’t, so fuck you,” she says about Musk.
Musk has been the recipient of some of Swisher’s harshest criticisms; she’s taken him to task with a level of zeal that seems to belie a deeper emotional reason for her frustration. Burn Book finally offers some insight as to what the answer might be. The sting of having interview requests rejected? A personal dislike borne of the liberal Swisher and the conservative Musk’s increasingly diverging political views? No, instead, it was something much more wholesome, yet wounding: disappointment.
“There is no doubt that Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur, perhaps the most of this age, but he has also become a lost cause to me, and I am not sure what he could do to turn that around at this point,” Swisher writes. “With Musk, it feels like it is only a question of time before we enter the Howard Hughes— another brilliant rich man who curdled badly— chapter of his story. And, as heinous as Musk has become, that outcome is one of the saddest developments in my long love story with tech.”
She speaks of Musk the way a disappointed mentor or teacher might of an exceptionally bright student who couldn’t quite seem to avoid getting sent to the principal’s office. “The reason I liked him [Musk] is because he thought big,” Swisher says. “As I started covering these people, I kept thinking there’s a lot of really smart people working on small ideas. Our time requires our Thomas Edisons to be a little more creative than creating a dry cleaning delivery service.”
Swisher is right that Musk does appear to have a preference for tackling complex problems, rather than developed consumer applications. Currently Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a commercial space exploration firm he cofounded, and of Tesla, credited with being the first car company to bring electric vehicles to the mass market. He is also the founder of Boring Company, an engineering firm trying to build underground tunnels for mass transportation.
“Nobody had a portfolio like that,” Swisher says of Musk. “So I would naturally be attracted to someone who was thinking big in a small-minded group of people who all they were interested in is their next billion dollars.”
Swisher calls Musk’s work to popularize electric vehicles at Tesla “a dream.” She was initially open-minded about his now defunct Hyperloop plan for subterranean public transportation. “What a good idea to go under cities,” she says. “Can we do that now?”
Even Musk’s zaniest ideas have founded a begrudging champion in Swisher. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I believe we should be a multi-planet species, too, because if we’re going to rely on this planet, we’re fucked,” Swisher says, referring to Musk’s longstanding desire to see mankind live on other planets.
Before Musk purchased Twitter, since renamed X, Swisher had him on a shortlist of executives she thought could turn the platform around. Twitter, Swisher says, was the “most emotionally fucked up place you’d ever seen.” The platform always had notable cultural significance, but punched far below its weight commercially. In 2021, Twitter was unprofitable with $5 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, its rival Meta did $117 billion and $39 billion in net income. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once memorably referred to Twitter as a “clown car that fell into a gold mine.”
“I had hopes that Musk, girded by his don’t-give-a-fuck persona, endless wealth, and deep interest in transforming the media, could be the owner to help Twitter realize its potential,” Swisher writes in Burn Book. “Looking back now, I was obviously and completely wrong.”
In the fall of 2022, shortly after Elon Musk closed his purchase of Twitter, Swisher (as she is wont to do on occasion) offered Musk some advice about what she thought was the right direction for the company. She even sent him a proof of concept from her own experience using Twitter Spaces, according to Burn Book.
“Be entertaining (TikTok), useful (Facebook, but increasingly less so) and must have (you can’t get it anywhere else),” she wrote Musk. “Otherwise, it is just a noisy place where idiots rule— that’s fine if you want to make a hot mess, but it’s not a business.”
But as Musk’s antics continued, Swisher’s own plans for Twitter went belly up. “I had gotten a very lucrative advertising deal that—the minute he started acting like a jackass—blew up,” she says.
