Give the techie in your life access to the inner workings of the companies and characters shaping Big Tech.
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It is tough to overestimate Big Tech’s influence on the modern world. But how did we get here? The best tech books unravel the rise and, occasionally, fall of some of the dominant companies and characters that created the gadgets and software we spend so much of our lives using.
You’ll find intensely detailed biographies, in-depth company histories, and plenty of drama and enlightenment in these tech tomes, and they also make great gifts for the techy folks in your life. You may also be interested in our Gifts for Book Lovers, Best Cookbooks, and Best Kindles guides.
Updated October 2026: I added five books, including Apple in China, More Everything Forever, Gouged, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and The Nerd Reich.
Chip Chase
Courtesy of Viking
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
by Stephen Witt
Charting Nvidia’s rise to become one of the most valuable companies on earth, this biography of cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang is educational and entertaining. Witt explains how the company spun GPU (graphics processing unit) manufacturing for gaming into parallel processing and a marriage of hardware and software that has powered the rise of AI. It has also made Huang very rich, but he isn’t always painted in a flattering light, which helps to counterbalance the founder worship vibe.
For a slightly different view on Nvidia's history, try The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant, by Tae Kim.
The Early Days of the Computer
Courtesy of Back Bay Books
The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder
A well-deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book should be required reading for anyone who works in technology or harbors a curiosity about how it came to dominate our lives. First published in 1981, the book reveals the inner workings of Data General in the 1970s as the company strives to design and release a successful next-generation minicomputer. Kidder captures the struggle between management and creatives and weaves a fascinating tale from an ostensibly dry subject. He explains the intense time pressure on engineers that led to a constant state of crunch, the need for recruits to feel like they are working on something important they have some stake in, and the psychology of leadership intent on realizing ambitious projects. It is positively prescient about the dangers of burnout for the unsung heroes who sacrifice so much to build new machines.
Follow this up with WIRED’s article chatting with some of the subjects in the book 20 years after it was published (this article itself is now more than 20 years old).
Evil Twin
Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
This fascinating dive down the rabbit hole of Covid conspiracy is ostensibly about how people confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a leftist journalist and climate activist; Wolf was a third-wave feminist but is now a rabid anti-vaxxer.
If you’re still puzzled over the convergence of wellness and the far-right or wondering why so many ordinary folks are swallowing the kind of misinformation that breeds racism and climate denialism, Klein has some convincing answers. This is challenging and sometimes bleak reading, but it was also the most important book of 2023. It's brutally honest, calling out the absurdities of capitalism and the role social media has played in the rise of narcissism.
An Icon
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Released just 19 days after the death of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, this astonishing biography takes a deep dive into his life and goes some way toward explaining his enduring legacy. Isaacson was picked by Jobs himself, who granted more than 40 interviews to his biographer and reportedly exerted no control over the final edit. Jobs’ intense passion and ambition saw him successfully marry creative ideas with technological innovations and sell them to the general public. This is an accessible book that never gets too technical. It insightfully charts the rise of Apple and Pixar and the development of the Mac, iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPad. While it is flattering at times, Jobs’ ruthlessness is not sugar-coated, and anyone with more than a passing interest in the man must read this book.
For a less Jobs-centric exploration of the Mac’s development, read Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld.
Cancel Culture
Courtesy of Picador
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
The dark side of the internet’s hive mind is brought into sharp relief by Ronson’s cast of characters—all have been publicly shamed via the internet. From the fascinating tale of Jonah Lehrer’s plagiarism to the vilification of Justine Sacco after an ill-advised joke tweet decried as racist, Ronson digs into the stories behind the scandals and looks at the havoc relentless online shaming can wreak. The book is a fun and fascinating look at how shame, empowered by social media, is a forceful form of social control with real-life consequences.
Jon Ronson is my favorite non-fiction writer, and I also highly recommend The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men and The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry.
Made in China
Courtesy of Scribner
Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
by Patrick McGee
Who would have thought that maximizing profit at any cost might lead to problems? Apple’s pursuit of every cent led it to outsource virtually all of its gadget production to China, and now it’s grappling with the economic, political, and cultural fallout. McGee has spoken with many former Apple executives and engineers to uncover what happened, why, and what it means for Apple and the US.
Google’s Machinings
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
I could have easily included a few entries from WIRED's own Steven Levy on this list, from his hugely influential 1984 debut, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, to his most recent release, Facebook: The Inside Story, but I’ve chosen In the Plex. Despite the impact of Google, a company whose name has become a verb, most of us know little about its internal workings. This is the best book to read if you want to change that. Levy secured unprecedented access to serve up a fascinating dive into what makes Google tick, what drove successful expansion into new areas, and how the company and its products have changed the world.
If you want more, How Google Works, by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, offers some insight into management at the company.
Resisting Big Tech
Courtesy of Verso
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
by Cory Doctorow
I remember when the internet was good, before we got trapped in walled gardens and Big Tech put the thumbscrews on us to extract every last cent. Cory Doctorow’s wonderfully evocative “theory of enshittification” is widely accepted now and increasingly common everywhere you look. He reckons that interoperability might just be the antidote, and while his sharp critiques are more fully formed than his suggested solutions, at least he’s trying to offer some hope.
The Rise and Fall of Theranos
Courtesy of Vintage
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Noble aims and raw ambition are lauded in the tech world, often attracting praise and investment, but what happens when a project goes wrong?
Building on Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou’s shocking exposé of Theranos, this book follows charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes as she tries and fails to build a blood testing machine to sweep away the need for hypodermic needles, with the promise of accurate tests done from a drop or two of blood via a pinprick on the finger. Although the company raised hundreds of millions of dollars, its technology was horribly inaccurate. Rather than admit defeat, it pressed on, which is why Holmes was put on trial for fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison. The book highlights the dangers of the popular “fake it till you make it” approach. Theranos reached a paper valuation of $9 billion and employed more than 800 people before its spectacular fall.
Broligarch Bashing
Courtesy of Basic Books
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
by Adam Becker
Silicon Valley ideology and the self-serving narratives of tech billionaires are exposed as delusional rationalizations for the crazed accumulation of wealth and power in this fascinating, reasoned, sometimes depressing, but always well-argued book. Becker does his homework thoroughly to debunk our immoral CEO overlords and the philosophies and movements they espouse.
Generative AI
Courtesy of Wildfire
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place
by Janelle Shane
If you can't help but ponder about artificial intelligence these days, you'll get a kick out of this book. It delves into machine-learning algorithms and their limitations in an accessible, engaging, and often hilarious way.
Shane is the research scientist behind the comical AI Weirdness blog, and she does a solid job of demystifying AI, explaining how machine learning really works, and highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. Although you’ll learn about things like generative adversarial networks, the book never gets dull, thanks to witty and moreish writing peppered with practical examples of AI attempts at creativity that are frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
Power Shifts
Courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis
Opening on a computerized superyacht, the talented Michael Lewis takes us on an adventure into the mind of billionaire Jim Clark, cofounder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics. The book charts the power shift in Silicon Valley startups from “money men” to “idea men” and engineers.
Lewis also attempts to uncover what drives Clark’s endless pursuit of the next thing and his seemingly unquenchable desire for more. This modern captain of industry is restless, constantly dissatisfied, and not very likable. The voyage is an interesting frame, and there are echoes of Kidder’s book in its subject’s idiosyncrasies and the author’s earnest attempt to explore what truly motivates him.
AI Race
Courtesy of St. Martin's Press
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson
The race to make AI mainstream is framed as a battle between CEOs, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, but Olson does a good job of showing how seeming idealists with good intentions can be swayed by billionaires and end up selling out. If you wonder about the forces fueling the AI arms race, how bloated valuations have led to political power, or the laundry list of ethical and legal concerns AI raises, you’ll find this book enlightening.
Silicon Valley
Courtesy of Penguin Books
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
If you have ever wondered how such a small suburban area came to dominate the tech world, Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington, has some answers. This concise and comprehensive book weaves together interviews, biographies, and countless other sources to explain how Silicon Valley has driven and dominated technological innovation. O’Mara exposes the foundations that self-mythologizing founders and businesses are built on, and the vital role the government played in their rise.
Folks seeking an insider’s view might like Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener.
Simon Hill is a senior writer for WIRED and has been testing and writing about technology for around 20 years. You can find his previous work at Business Insider, Reviewed, TechRadar, Android Authority, USA Today, Digital Trends, and many other places. He loves all things tech, but especially smartphones and ... Read More