She knows them all. She met Mark Zuckerberg when he took Facebook to California, Jeff Bezos when Amazon was a fledgling online bookstore, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen when the company was just going public. She was there at the start of the tech revolution in the early 1990s, first on the business beat at the Washington Post and later at the Wall Street Journal.

It's made her immune to the puffery that surrounds many tech titans. If you know someone before they're really rich and famous, "they can't really trick you with hype", she says. "I don't get easily fooled by their PR people."

"It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, 'I hope Kara never sees this'," Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told New York magazine.

Swisher now runs Recode, a tech/media website and conference business she launched with colleague Walt Mossberg and later sold to Vox Media. Her scoops are legendary, as are her contacts.

Recode's signature event is the Code conference, formerly D:All Things Digital, an invite-only tech talkfest that in 2007 hosted a historic onstage conversation between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg was made to sweat so much under tough questioning on privacy issues he took off his trademark hoodie. This year's speakers included Gates and his wife Melinda, Bezos, Elon Musk, Twitter founder and chairman Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

"I don't like journalists that celebrate success before it happens", says Swisher. "I don't like snarky but we are not your cheerleaders either."

With her trademark puffer jacket, aviator sunglasses and smartphone always to hand – she was holding a Blackberry when she gave birth – Swisher is at once direct and damning, playful and personable. Visiting Sydney for the Walkley Foundation's Storyology conference this week, she shared some insights in an interview.

Silicon Valley's arrogance will be its downfall – but not yet.

There is nowhere else with such a "vast collection of talent, money and hype", but that doesn't mean it won't get beaten, she says. Interesting innovation is happening in China and Israel; in Australia there's enterprise software company Atlassian which is "pretty cool ... but that's just a single company". "Too much arrogance, too much bullshit" will be the death of Silicon Valley. At a certain level of wealth and power, a tendency to become more risk averse and less open to new ideas can set in, Swisher says.

Artificial intelligence is important, dangerous, and will be misused.

AI is developing quickly and some of it is "potentially more powerful than governments", Swisher says. Right now, Google and Facebook have the most powerful AI capabilities, but "do we want our future in the hands of two private companies who will be able to manipulate things?" The job implications are "massive", because "computers can do pretty much everything better than humans".

The "big guys" of tech have been mystifyingly silent on Donald Trump.

Nearly 150 technology executives recently signed an open letter warning Donald Trump would be "a disaster for innovation". They included eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar, Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter Inc. co-founder Evan Williams. Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has been outspoken but "that's pretty much it", even though Trump's views are "anathema" to the tech industry and every statement he makes about tech is "idiotic". "I think he is a danger to innovation and they should care, and say something," Swisher says. Why don't they? "I don't get it. I guess they like having lots of money."

Self-driving vehicles, life hacking and new technology around food delivery will change the way we live.

Swisher is glad maturing tech moguls are "realising there is a more significant impact they can have on the planet", and are looking at solving more important global problems than "making stupid photo apps". Success comes from great products aimed at ordinary people. "It seems to me if you have a great product, most of the time you will succeed." Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, "will go down in history" for creating products that people love, or are useful.

Twitter is a great product, Yahoo not so much.

Swisher has a million Twitter followers and tweets keenly. Though she likes Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, she says the company is being "mismanaged". "It is hard to use for the average person ... they have not evolved the product." Yahoo is a different story. Swisher has been a strong critic of CEO Marissa Mayer's leadership. Her most recent story on Mayer, referring to Yahoo's $4.83 billion sale to Verizon, said that Mayer was "trying mightily to put a shiny, happy face on a deal that will effectively be taking away her job and washing away her efforts to turn around Yahoo". "We were right, and we were right when it was unpopular to say the things we said about Marissa Mayer." Swisher says Mayer thinks Recode has been waging war against her, but it's not personal. "It's a war against incompetence and hype. We called it like we saw it."

Her biggest journalism mistake has been "not being tougher".

"I have given people too much rope and not hung them." A lot of journalists get "sucked up in the envy and desire to be part of the group", but the people she writes about have nothing she wants – except their stories. "That is what I want, I want to hear what's happening without fear or favour, so I think that is probably scary to people ... I think if someone [like her] is not vindictive, but they are not going to let up, that is probably frightening to people."