Kara Swisher Is Thinking About Life After Trump

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2:44They isolate themselves in their wealth. They didn't have any safety thoughts in their brains. They never felt unsafe and therefore they created systems that were easily abused and easily gained and they didn't care. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

3:10I have a pretty clear memory of where I was when I sent my first ever email. It was from a computer in a university library in, I think, 1994. And as it happens over in the US at exactly the same moment, Kara Swisher was also discovering the brand new world of the internet. Only she was asking big questions. Who's behind this technology? Where's it going? At the time, she was a journalist with the Washington Post based in DC, but she soon moved to Silicon Valley and immersed herself in that environment. She got to know all the key players from Steve Jobs to the Googlers to the AOL guys to the very young Mark Zuckerberg.

3:57And she's developed and honed a deep knowledge of big tech ever since. The reason she commands great respect and to some extent fear is because she doesn't pull her punches, she's unafraid to talk about what's not right, about the personal failing sometimes of the key people, about tech and US politics and what's going to happen next as this year goes on. So for many reasons, Kara Swisher is worth listening to. And as it's the start of a new year, I wondered what she's got her eye on. Well, for this coming year, I think a lot of focus will be on whether big tech continues its hegemony, especially influenced with Donald Trump.

4:42Obviously, the midterms are coming up and the tech industry has been running wild in the Trump administration, whether it's crypto, whether it's this recent executive order about AI, which will not hold up in court. But, you know, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run up in their stock prices because they're basically running the stock market. So a question of what will happen to valuations, whether there will be an AI bust, I think everyone will be focused in on. It has a lot of echoes to the internet crash. And it happened right after the new year then too. And sort of was a darker winter for tech at that time.

5:14So that's one question. The other is IPOs. There's a lot of possible IPOs coming up, whether it's Stripe or OpenAI or SpaceX and things like that. And that could really invigorate the tech system. And where are the valuations of those? But I think probably most people are focusing on whether AI will be a bust, whether it's a bubble. So you are taking the thought that this could be an AI bubble seriously. You do not think that that's something we should disregard? No, not at all. Why would you disregard it? You're being stupid, too. These build-outs are enormous. And the question is, where's the business behind it?

5:46And how patient investors are going to be about it? It's not to say that AI is an important and critical going forward, and it is the industry that is the next iteration or the next Cambrian explosion. But they may be ahead of their skis, right? with these too many data centers, too many back and forth deals. It feels a little round trippy in a lot of ways that are holding each other's valuations up. I think Nvidia has an outsized role here the way Cisco did in the first internet. So you're going to wait and see if companies so far seem to be buying, and I'm not talking about just non-tech companies think AI is important.

6:22There might be a point where they're like, maybe we don't need to spend this much on this technology now to get the savings we need. And is there something circular that's dangerous for the industry, which is that they need the IPOs to get the investment, to get money flowing in, but the IPOs and going public also puts further pressure on them and greater pressure on them to achieve the returns? Well, they've done plenty well being private, like these valuations. And they're for sale. You can buy and sell stock, you know, on the private market of these things. I mean, I think the most interesting IPO would be the SpaceX IPO, because I think it's$1.5 trillion.

6:56It didn't grow that much last year. I think it went from$13 to$15 billion. I think that's what it is. I think it's correct. So it didn't grow as much as, say, OpenAI did. But it's going to own space. SpaceX is going to, right now, not forever, is going to own space. I think it's got 90 % of the rocket launches here, some crazy number. So that's a separate IPO that's different. The only thing is related to Elon Musk, who also has to drag around Twitter and Grok behind him. And Tesla, of course, which is seeing, even though the stock has managed to stay afloat, the business is disintegrating, you know, at a very rapid pace.

7:30He provided one of my most memorable, if toughest moments of 2025, when I had a long conversation with him. So, yeah, some of this, well, certainly came up then. Yeah, it's pointless to interview him right now. He's not there. He's there to be a troll. That's really, it's pointless. He doesn't say anything of any substance. He just says, makes things up. And he avoids it most of the time, right? He makes stuff up. Other than in a very friendly setting. Yeah, exactly. I just want to get one bigger point before we pivot more into you, which is that, is there a lack of big enough ideas? I mean, Elon Musk has certainly had them.

8:06But overall, you have said recently that in a way the industry is below its potential, that people aren't necessarily solving the big problems of our age. Well, there's a lot of promise with AI, right? I've just finished a documentary about health and AI. There's not just AI, but longevity. And AI plays a big role in terms of drug discovery, in terms of, I was just at a lab in the University of Pennsylvania, and they're using it for vaccines. The problem is the Trump administration is cutting money to those places. and so they're all going to Canada. So that's who will benefit from this. But there's a lot of promise of where it could go, right?

8:40In terms of not just job destruction, but job creation too, and all kinds of new and fresh ideas getting forward. The question is, is it fast enough or is it more of a slow burn the way electricity was? Electricity didn't change everything overnight. And the question is, how do we adapt it? And I don't think we have enough imagination to know right now, because like at the beginning of the internet, when I started covering it in the early nineties, you didn't know there was going to be Uber or Airbnb or, you know, Google didn't exist until almost the turn of the century. So we just don't know where this is going, but it's certainly promising.

9:15There's no question about it. So take me back then to your own relationship with the industry, if you like. I was struck by the words in your book where you characterized it as a meet cute love story that turned sour. Right. Let's do the love story then. Yeah. Do you remember sending your first email? Do you remember the first key internet moment you had? Yeah, I think it was when I downloaded Calvin and Hobbes comic collection on a university server. I was at Duke and I messed up because at the time you didn't have that much speed. And so the person who was running it was at me because I clogged it up.

9:51But I was like, I downloaded a book and he was like, so what? I'm like, so what? Everything can be downloaded. I remember thinking everything that can be digitized would be digitized. And then my imagination took off. Like what else can be digitized? Well, my entire workplace, when I looked around and there was still paper there, like what's paper doing here? Why do we need paper? Why do we need phones on the desks? Why do we need to be at the desks? You know, why can't we be on the move? And, you know, I was a very early user of cell phones. I was a very early user of a lot of this stuff. And some of it was silly, But most of it, you could see it shifting and changing how we work and live.

10:26And so it was really like probably being around when the car or plane was invented, right? Like, wow, like, whoa. So would I understand you correctly if I say that I think that you loved the products, the technology, the promise of the technology, some of the products. But you weren't convinced by a lot of the people even early on. I think lots of people you're sitting with when you end up moving to Silicon Valley and they're making these big promises, we're going to change the world. Some of them do. A lot of them don't. Right. I think very early on, one of my first articles when I was at the Washington Post covering AOL, right, because it was in the area.

10:59It was a local company. But when I moved for the journal where I really started covering these companies in the 96 period of time, this is 1996 kids. It's way in the last century. But when I started doing that, it was very clear, one, that these were groundbreaking technologies and number two, that people doing it were very young and very ill-informed. And so what was striking to me in one of the first stories I did for the journal was, I think it was the top 10 lies Silicon Valley people have told me since I got here. And one of them was, we're in this together. The other was, we don't care about money.

11:32It's all about community. There are no titles here. It was all a lie. They all were very monarchical. Like, you know, they'd have hoodies, but they'd be like cashmere hoodies. There was always such a disconnect. We don't care about those things. And of course, every one of them ended up with a private plane and a private chef. I mean, look, real serious wealth creates real problems for people. They isolate themselves in their wealth, essentially. And so you could see the warping of them right from the get-go or as it was starting, because they loved to tell lies about things. Most of them were harmless at the time, but later not so harmless.

12:05But you would call them lies, not just hype. You would say they were saying things that were not true. Yeah, they were lying to themselves. I had covered other industries, and they had an evangelical bent to them, right? I suspect it was probably like this when you had the founders of Hollywood. You know, they started it, and so they really had a real belief system. The finance guys were just like, we're here to make money. I was like, okay, got it. Thank you. Like, essentially, they weren't there to change the world. There was a lot of discussion about changing the world, and it was very religious, almost.

12:38It became increasingly religious, and it's not religion like Catholicism, but it kind of is. It was an ethos and a culture that was really, having studied propaganda for years, it felt a lot like that. I did that at Georgetown, like watching propaganda move. And then when they had the tools of propaganda, which was to weaponize and exploit information, well, then the story changed really quickly. Who do you mean, Kara, when you say they? Oh, Zuckerberg. You know, someone who had built a worldwide network of information, right? Largely on other people's ideas sometimes. Although, you know, look, I give it to him.

13:14He's an excellent, he's sort of like Bill Gates in that regard. Although Bill Gates became a better person and I have great hopes for Mark Zuckerberg someday. But, you know, this sort of idea that it's really good that we let people do whatever they want and give them all the information and there's not going to be a problem. It was a naivete and an ignorance of history, of everything else, and a pretend that it wasn't his fault. You know, I'm sorry I made this gun. I didn't know people would get shot by it. Like, it's not my fault people get shot by my guns. I'm like, but they're designed to shoot people.

13:47You know, several different interviews showed that really that I did with him over the years. He doesn't speak to me now. Yeah, I know you had a couple of exchanges with him that were really striking for different reasons. Yeah. I remember the period in 2011 when the Arab Spring happened. I did a documentary called How Facebook Changed the World. I slightly cringe when I think about the title of that now because at that time, well, social media was, we saw it as benign at that time. It was connecting people who were not being connected in other ways. 2016, the US election, it's a different story by then.

14:23Right. Which is why I wonder, perhaps it is not all their fault. There is something of the gun argument that the technology was also used in nefarious ways, albeit it obviously always had that potential. The fault would be our regulators who decided to let them do whatever they wanted. They have a product that has a lot of safety issues around it, and they never wanted to address any of it, and nor did anyone force them to. So you could blame citizens, I guess, if we could have risen up against them. And that just doesn't happen. But our legislators never made a move around privacy. I mean, I used to write about this all night.

14:56I did an Internet Bill of Rights. Here's 10 things that will not stop innovation and are important for the safety of consumers. You could have seen this stuff coming. Like, it wasn't like it was that hard to understand propaganda. You know, you could just study Hitler, study Mussolini, study any of the autocrats. There's a playbook that's really quite robust over the many centuries of humanity. So I think that they didn't have any safety thoughts in their brains. They never felt unsafe, and therefore they created systems that were easily abused and easily gamed. And they didn't care. Like, if you designed a car with this many lack of safety features, you know what happened in the car industry, they had to put seatbelts in.

15:35They had to put airbags in. That's not to decry the car. Some people don't like cars. I happen to. But, you know, I think it's safer with seatbelts and airbags. And I'm sure the people in the car industry would have preferred not to put that in. It's a big cost. So they just didn't care about the consequences. And I've never seen an industry without any regulation whatsoever and have caused us great harm. That's all. I just compare it to other industries. All those other industries would do the same thing. If pharmaceutical companies are allowed to pollute rivers, they certainly would. They have.

16:08There's histories of that. Watch Erin Brockovich, you know, like they just do it until they can't. How do you think you changed in this period of covering the industry? Did you yourself have massive belief at the beginning? Clearly a lot of enthusiasm because you saw the potential. I love technology. Did you become cynical along the way as you saw some of these characters? I mean, there were Others weren't they like Steve Jobs? He actually thought about safety. He thought about privacy. He thought about, like, he was an adult. So he would, when you said it to him, he didn't act like you had stuck him in an eye with a dry stick.

16:39You know, he could, like, have a discussion about it. That's why, I guess it's a low bar. But, you know, every time you say something tough to Mark Zuckerberg, he looks like you killed him. Like, oh, how dare you say this to me, sir? If you study technology history, electricity had plenty of problems with safety. Every single industry has this tension. It's just that nobody moved in. They are the same people, except now they're the richest people on earth with the most expensive companies. And it's going to be very hard to pull them back, especially because they're being facilitated by a president who openly accepts donations.

17:14And I'm using that. Donations is doing a lot of work there. Who is part of the system. They've made$5 billion, the Trumps, in cryptocurrency over the past couple of months. That's pretty good. But when you lived in Silicon Valley, which you did for a long time, and your former wife was at Google, you socialized with the founders. No. No? You were at the same parties. I mean, you described some of the parties in the book. There were a lot of work parties. Yes, they weren't my friends. I mean, maybe one or two became friends. But I can't think of, well, way lower down. But no, we didn't hang out and massage each other's feet or anything like that.

17:47But I knew them really well. And they were accessible. And then they weren't, obviously, a lot of them. Some of them were, some of them weren't. I worked for the Wall Street Journal by this time, so they really wanted to know me because they were building their businesses and the more they could interact. At the time, the journal, like Walt Mossberg, could make or break products, right? If he said, I didn't like this, I did like this. I was under no illusion that they were my friends, though, I have to say. He was a legendary, I should explain, he was a legendary columnist who was also a mentor to you and you worked together.

18:16A partner with me. Yeah. Right, exactly. So when you think about the change, I just interviewed Sam Harris. The tech guys loved him. I would say he has not changed. They have changed. And he is calling them out now. Like, Sam Harris was all mobbed up with those people. I mean, they liked him. They liked his work. And he just kept saying, what you're doing is incomprehensible and heinous. And then they got mad at him for being normally critical, which is what he was of everything. Same thing with Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens. They couldn't get enough of Sapiens in Yuval Harari. Then he wrote a book that said these information systems are not unlike the propaganda from the Middle Ages that killed a lot of women.

18:52And then they're like, what are you talking about? So I don't think Yuval, myself or Sam have changed. They have changed. There does seem to be a common thread of being very thin-skinned. I don't know why about this industry, but I found it must. Well, you got the big one. You got Elon. But you did think he was different, I think. I did, and he was. Let me say, I feel like that's the one I got wrong. Completely wrong. Not completely wrong, no. Because look, what Tesla did was astonishing. Same thing with SpaceX. He was the earliest person I talked to artificial intelligence. Now, it's been around, artificial intelligence has been around from the 50s, I think, the 1950s.

19:29But he was the first person to talk about the importance and danger of it. First person I talked to about it in Silicon Valley. So until his most recent personal toils, which I think have been well reported, he had a vision that was big. And then who knows what happened? The hatefulness, the obsession with trans people, the drug use, everything else just got out of, I don't know. Howard Hughes comes to mind when I think of him.

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