The Insider

Is Kara Swisher tearing down tech billionaires—or burnishing their legends?

- Helen Lewis

Few journalists and their sources have fallen out as completely as Kara Swisher and Elon Musk. The reporter met the future billionaire in the late 1990s, when she was a tech correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and he was just another Silicon Valley boy wonder.

Over more than two decades, they developed a spiky but mutually useful relationship, conducted through informal emails and texts as well as public interviews.

Their frenemy shtick was on display, for example, when Swisher interviewed Musk for Vox on Halloween in 2018. He deadpanned that he loved her "costume." She was wearing her signature look black leather jacket, black jeans, aviator sunglasses presumably just out of view. "Thank you! I'm dressed as a lesbian from the Castro in San Francisco," she replied. The pair posed together for a photograph: him seated and her standing, one arm casually resting on his shoulder, an image that signaled she was more than a mere stenographer or grateful supplicant. She was a Silicon Valley player in her own right.

That image illustrates the pact that Swisher has developed with so many masters of the tech universe ever since she began to cover (and champion) the industry. She would be tough and inquisitive, asking the types of blunt questions about screwups and misfires that these supposed visionaries rarely faced in their heavily gatekept existence. They would parry her blows with charm, self-deprecating humor, and occasionally unwise honesty or unwitting selfexposure. Both would derive some benefit. At a minimum, the tech overlords would get credit for stepping into the gladiatorial arena. The audience benefited, too, from Swisher acting as our eyes and ears inside an industry that was changing our lives.