Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang was in a board meeting when he received a text from tech reporter Kara Swisher, asking bout a decision the Yahoo board had made.
The problem was that this decision had just been made in that very meeting.
“His response was approximately, ‘That literally just happened in the boardroom. Who is leaking to you?’” Swisher writes in her new book, “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” (Simon & Schuster, out now).
“My reply? ‘Look to the left, look to the right. It’s the whole room.”
Swisher has been covering the tech industry since the early 1990s. Her early understanding of its importance gave her an inside view of the professional and often personal lives of the now-iconic moguls who made it all happen.
A conversation with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 1999, as he prepared to become a first-time father, led to him peppering the LGBT-Swisher, a mother of four, about how lesbians have children. She walked him through the sperm donation and insemination process, and recalled his fascination and comfort with the topic.
“At one point, he asked me why I would use an anonymous donor versus someone I knew…like him,” Swisher writes. “It was in no way an offer, but I joked back that while he was rich, he was too short and bald.”
Swisher also writes about Bill Gates sulking his way through 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 somebody in hell,” Gates was crestfallen, later answering a question backstage by blurting out, “Why would I know that? I run hell.”
But Swisher was no stranger to sensitive and anxious founders.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so prone to nerves that Swisher thought staffers were joking when they said that he has panic attacks when speaking in public, and might faint.
Swisher then saw how true this was.
“As sweat poured down Mark Zuckerberg’s pasty and rounded face,” she writes of an early Zuckerberg appearance, “I wondered if he was going to keel over right at my feet.” — Larry Getlen
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