Kara Swisher

Swisher received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, graduating in 1984, and her graduate degree from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry’s School of Journalism.⁠[1][2]

In a March 2025 episode of On with Kara Swisher, she recalled that while at Georgetown she was covering a campus story for her college newspaper, called the Metro editor of The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry to complain about the paper’s coverage of the same story, and was hired on the spot as a stringer; she said the many stories she wrote about her college helped get her into Columbia’s graduate school of journalism. “I got my first job in journalism by being irritating, so why should I stop now?” she said.⁠[3]

She recalled that she later worked at the Post in the mail room, as a night copy aide, as a news aide, as an intern for “Style Plus” and as a fill-in for the business section, which turned into a reporting job covering retail workplace issues; she became the paper’s first reporter to cover the nascent digital-services business in the Washington area, including AOLAOLAOL is an American internet brand offering a news portal, email, and membership services. Its history dates to an online-services company founded in 1985.Open the full entry, then a small company in Vienna, Virginia. Earlier in her career she also worked as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C.⁠[3][2]

In the mid-1990s she went to Seattle to look at Jeff BezosJeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry’s start-up AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, where she met Bezos.⁠[3]

In 1997 Swisher joined The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry, describing herself as its first reporter specifically covering the internet. She worked in the paper’s San Francisco bureau and for many years wrote the “BoomTown” column, which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and online at WSJ.com; she also covered breaking news about the web’s major players and internet policy issues.⁠[3][2]

Her book aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web was published by Times Business Books in July 1998; the sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future, was published by Crown Business Books in the fall of 2003.⁠[2]

Starting in 2003, Swisher and Walt MossbergWalt MossbergAmerican technology journalist, columnist and conference interviewer who created The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Technology column and co-founded AllThingsD, Recode, and the D and Code conferences with Kara Swisher. He retired in 2017 and later became vice chair of the News Literacy Project board.Open the full entry co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference series, whose interviewees included Bill Gates, Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s leadership, Tim Cook and Jack Dorsey. The two were also co-executive editors of AllThingsD.com, a tech and media website founded in 2007.⁠[2]

After Bezos bought The Washington Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, Swisher wrote an open letter to him on AllThingsD: “Don’t treat the Post like some precious thing that cannot be touched or changed.”⁠[3]

In 2013 The Wall Street Journal declined to renew its contract with Swisher and Mossberg; in September 2013, after months of negotiations, AllThingsD spun out of the paper as an independent entity.⁠[4][5]

In January 2014 Swisher, Mossberg and a number of their AllThingsD colleagues launched the technology news site Re/code.⁠[5]

On May 26, 2015, Vox Media acquired Re/code; financial terms were not disclosed. Vox Media already owned the tech site The Verge.⁠[5]

After Recode joined Vox Media, Swisher served as Recode’s co-founder and editor-at-large, produced and hosted the Recode Decode podcast and was co-executive producer of the Code Conference series; she also had a special series on MSNBCMS NOWMS NOW (My Source for News, Opinion and the World) is an American cable channel for political news and commentary. It was formerly MSNBC, launched in July 1996 as a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft, adopted its current name on November 15, 2025, as its business was spun off from Comcast, and since January 2026 has belonged to the independent public company Versant Media Group. It is known for its liberal-leaning commentary programs.Open the full entry, Revolution, on the impact of technology on work and society.⁠[2][4]

In 2021 she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the area of Leadership, Policy, and Communications.⁠[2]

In 2018 Swisher and NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway launched Pivot, a weekly podcast on technology, business and politics; Adweek named it Thought Leadership Podcast of the Year in 2019.⁠[6]

Also in 2018 she joined The New York Times as an opinion contributor, and in 2020 the Times podcast she hosted, Sway, premiered. “I wasn’t ever an employee of the New York Times,” she later said.⁠[7][4]

On April 13, 2020, New York Magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell announced that Pivot would join the magazine; the show remained part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, had moved from weekly to twice-weekly that winter, and was executive-produced by Erica Anderson.⁠[6]

Before September 2022 she also hosted the official podcast of HBO’s Succession.⁠[4]

In June 2022 Swisher decided to leave The New York Times and return to Vox Media to launch a new interview podcast as a companion to Pivot. “I’m 60 years old this year, I’ve made a lot of stuff for a lot of people,” she said in an interview. “I want to do what I want to do.”⁠[7]

At the Code Conference on September 7, 2022, Swisher moderated a panel in which Apple CEO Tim Cook, former AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry design chief Jony Ive and Emerson CollectiveEmerson CollectiveEmerson Collective is an investment and philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Structured as a limited liability company, it supports businesses and nonprofits through venture investments, grants and collaborative programs in education, economic mobility, immigration, the environment, health and media.Open the full entry founder Laurene Powell JobsLaurene Powell JobsLaurene Powell Jobs is an entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, and the founder and president of Emerson Collective. She cofounded College Track and XQ Institute and established the Waverley Street Foundation to support climate action. She is also lead investor and board chair of The Atlantic and became an independent Skydance director in October 2026.Open the full entry reflected on Steve Jobs’s legacy.⁠[4]

On September 26, 2022, the interview podcast On with Kara Swisher premiered, releasing episodes on Mondays and Thursdays alongside a weekly companion conversation on Twitter Spaces. The show came out of a new three-year deal between Swisher and Vox Media, separate from her contract for Pivot.⁠[8][4]

“I wanted control and I wanted to own the IP,” she said. She said one reason she came to value ownership was that The Wall Street Journal had lost a large batch of archived material from its site, including work by her and her colleagues.⁠[4]

The show is built around direct interviews with power players across business, tech, media and politics. “Smart people,” Swisher says, “like difficult questions.”⁠[9]

In an episode of On with Kara Swisher published on March 23, 2023, Swisher interviewed OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry co-founder Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry about his move from Y Combinator to OpenAI, GPT-4, and the regulation and risks of artificial intelligence. When Swisher noted that he had written that superhuman machine intelligence was probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity, Altman replied: “Yep. I still think so.”⁠[10]

Swisher’s memoir Burn Book was published on February 27, 2024. Part memoir and part history, it recounts her coverage of the digital sector since the early 1990s and her encounters with figures including Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.⁠[11]

In July 2024, on NPR’s Book of the Day, she said she was not surprised when people like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk lied to her, and that despite her disillusionment with the harm the industry had caused, she remained optimistic about the future of technology and AI.⁠[12]

In an episode of On with Kara Swisher released on March 3, 2025, Swisher laid out her effort to buy The Washington Post from Jeff Bezos and restore the paper, which was not for sale. She said she “certainly” had “the ability to raise the money needed” and called the effort “a love story.”⁠[3]

On January 29, 2026, CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry announced that Swisher, a CNN contributor, would host a new CNN Original Series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever. Produced by EverWonder Studio, the series investigates the longevity and anti-aging industry, and Swisher is among its executive producers.⁠[13]

The six-episode series premiered on CNN on April 11, 2026, with interviews including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, entrepreneur Bryan JohnsonBryan JohnsonBryan Johnson is an entrepreneur and investor who founded Braintree and OS Fund and later pursued neurotechnology and personal health experimentation through Project Blueprint and the Don’t Die initiative.Open the full entry, CRISPR pioneer and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, Scott Galloway and Reed Jobs. “My goal is the same as it always has been: To find out,” Swisher said.⁠[14]

In October 2026 Swisher and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton began co-hosting High Stakes, a limited podcast series focused on the 2026 U.S. midterm elections; the debut episode discussed topics including that year’s Senate races.⁠[15]

New York Magazine: Official website: https://nymag.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

On with Kara Swisher: Official website: https://podcasts.voxmedia.com/show/on-with-kara-swisher (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/karaswisher (opens in a new window).⁠[16]