Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher (born 1962) has covered Silicon Valley longer and more bluntly than almost anyone alive — from the Wall Street Journal to co-founding AllThingsD and Recode with Walt Mossberg, to her podcasts On with Kara Swisher and Pivot and her 2024 memoir Burn Book. Every consequential tech CEO of three decades has squirmed in her interview chair.

The Twinkie thesis

Swisher’s AI position has hardened over time. In late 2024 she told Context “AI is the internet. Bigger, better, bigger, more,” urging entrepreneurs to build on the tools while the AI companies subsidized them. By early 2026 she was telling Bloomberg that the year would test AI’s massive valuations, and by that spring she was making a blunter argument on her podcast: the ceiling on AI is not technical but human — people simply do not like the stuff.

She pointed to survey data showing Gen Z hope about AI falling year over year, and to a cultural turn toward the authentic and away from the synthetic. Yet she keeps interviewing the field’s principals — from Sam Altman to Geoffrey Hinton — and concedes the technology matters the way the internet mattered. Her skepticism is aimed at the hype, the valuations, and the tech barons she has spent a career deflating, not at the idea of the technology itself.