BY
KARA SWISHER
A valuable book on the personalities of the Tech Industry as well as interesting discussions on the good and the bad of tech inventions.
4 stars out of 5 stars
From the title of the book, it is not easy for the average reader to decipher what the book is about. The answer can be found in the Prologue in the beginning of the book. The author, a journalist, who has been covering Silicon Valley and the Internet Industry for decades, was disappointed that “an increasing number of those once fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for now made me feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes.” The breaking point was when “The crowned heads of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech companies had been summed to tromp into Manhattan’s Trump Tower and meet the man who had unexpectedly just been elected president and was the antithesis of all they supposedly represented.” One of tech’s top tier players who had not been invited due to his “liberal leanings” (an outcast) called the author and stated “Sucking up to that corpulent loser who never had a business he didn’t drive straight into a wall, it’s shameful…” I guess that was when the author decided to write this book.
If you are surprised to see the word “assholes” appearing so early in the book, you are in for a shock. The prologue ends with a doubly emphasized f word. If you are not offended and read on, you will learn stories about several famous names such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, as well as names who are less well known to those not in tech, for example, Marc Benioff and Dave Goldberg. You need to be forewarned, however, that the f word appears regularly throughout the book, including four times on a single page. I leave it as a puzzle for the reader to find out what this page is.
Not surprisingly, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos received the most detailed coverage. An interesting metric, the “Prick to Productivity Ratio” (P2P) is introduced by the author to quantify her judgments of the powerful people she had covered over the years. Briefly, she would consider what she thought were someone’s accomplishments, against her highly subjective assessment of their characters, based on her own interactions. “A good P2P has a higher second number than a first, or someone’s character outweighs their innovation.” The P2P ratios she gave Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are 8/10 and 7/10 respectively. She did not give on to Jeff Bezos. As for Elon Musk, “Musk utterly broke my ratio by turning up the prick to 11. To 12. To infinity and beyond. P2P ratio: ∞/WTF.
The author did not give a P2P ratio to Mark Zuckerberg, whom she devoted a whole chapter 9, entitled “The Most Dangerous Man”. Chapter 13, entitled “I, Asshole”, was devoted to Elon Musk. To the author, Musk is”the most disappointing man in tech.”
Chapter 14 is entitled “The Mensches”. I wonder how many readers know what the word Mensches means. Well, it means a person of dignity and honor. A long list of names appears in this chapter, including Mark Cuban and less well-known ones such as Dave Goldberg.
One annoying feature is that there is no index. In the author’s opinion, indexes encourage one to just look up certain topics instead of reading the whole book. This certainly does not apply to me. The Index facilities me to read certain subjects further without searching through the book to find them, a time-wasting and annoying task. A no-index book certainly makes the reviewer’s task more difficult. No doubt it is hard work to prepare a good index, but it is a worthwhile task.
There are memorable quotes, two of which are given below. The second one was from Steve Job’s Commencement Speech at Stanford University in 2005.
- “If both died on the same day, Gates’s obituary would begin by noting that he was ‘the world’s richest man’ while Jobs would begin with the words ‘tech’s greatest visionary’ .”
“You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
In conclusion, a valuable book on the personalities of the Tech Industry as well as interesting discussions on the good and the bad of tech inventions.
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