Sarah McBride has built her career on finding the human stories behind Silicon Valley’s biggest technologies. A longtime business reporter who has worked at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently Bloomberg News, McBride has covered early-stage startups, tech behemoths, and everything in between, chronicling how personality, capital, and power shape innovation. She’s documented the trials and triumphs of one of America’s most polarizing innovators, Elon Musk, investigating the safety lapses of his tunneling venture, the Boring Company, and reporting on his biotech company, Neuralink, as it seeks to link brains and machines.
McBride approaches the work with a level head and steady hand — skeptical but not cynical — and with an understanding that bold corporate claims often crumple under real-world limits. She’s interested less in hype than in how ideas hold up once put into practice.
McBride is now at MIT, where she is a 2025–26 Knight Science Journalism Fellow. In an interview edited for length and clarity, she spoke with me about her path to journalism, navigating hype cycles, and finding the human elements of technology stories.
Ana Georgescu: You started out aiming to be a foreign correspondent. How did you end up finding your way into business and tech reporting?
Sarah McBride: When I came out of journalism school, I wasn’t averse to being a business journalist. I was somewhat interested in it, but mostly I was interested in going overseas. I got a great internship first at the Kuwait Times. Then I went to The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., which was a great place to be an intern.
After my internship, I was offered a news assistant job. It was mostly sorting mail and faxes, which they don’t really have anymore, but just that task took up over two hours a day. I remember thinking, “I have a master’s degree and I’m sorting the mail.” It was dispiriting at times, but it was also a foothold at a very prestigious institution. When you do find the time to write, you’re learning a lot because you’re getting edited by amazing editors.
I did that for about a year and a half before a better job [with the Journal] opened up in Hong Kong. I spent six years there. First, I was on the overnight desk, then I started reporting on Asian mutual funds and stocks. I’ll be honest, I had to kind of develop an interest in it, but it was good for me. It taught me things like how to read a balance sheet and certain language involved with covering businesses.
AG: I love that you’re being honest about having also followed an open position as opposed to always knowing you wanted to specialize in business reporting. Was it a difficult transition?
SM: Business is full of basic human stuff: battles for power, people who succeed and then fail spectacularly. It’s got all the same tension and drama as anything else — you just have to get the vocabulary straight before you can report on it. Once you do that, you can tell all kinds of interesting personality stories.
And business journalists aren’t immune to economic trouble, but it’s a more marketable skill. It’s much easier to get a job in business journalism, and then you can think of it just as any other type of human drama.
You can write about someone like Elon Musk without understanding the financial basis of his companies, but it really helps. You can tell a deeper, richer story if you understand the pressures he’s under from shareholders and how his companies are structured. Nobody truly understands that structure, but having a sense of it lets you tell a more nuanced story.
AG: Many of your stories explore accountability at the edge of new technology, how do you approach reporting on those frontiers?
SM: You have to go into everything being super skeptical about whether it’ll work. For journalists, that can be hard, because then people think, “Oh, you’re out to get us.” But it’s not that, it’s about being practical and realistic about the challenges.
Somebody very committed to their technology often appreciates that skepticism. It forces them to show why they think obstacles can be overcome. But it can be hard to get to the bottom of those challenges, especially if you don’t have the technical knowledge. Then you have to go find other people who do.
Other entrepreneurs love talking smack about their competitors, not on the record, but that can be useful. Sometimes you can get an idea of what competitors think the problems are, and then go to an academic. I remember calling an expert here at MIT about tunneling who really doesn’t have any skin in the game. I showed him a photo from the Boring Company, and he immediately said, for vacuum conditions, you’d need this and that, so no, [their claim] isn’t possible. Having people like that is invaluable.
AG: After years of covering startups, what red flags do you look for?
SM: One thing is always to set up a legal alert on the companies you’re following, so you can see if they file a lawsuit or if someone files one against them. Another is to dig into funding. Startups will announce they’ve raised money, but you have to ask: Is it real? Are they getting all the money now, or do they have to hit revenue or scientific targets first?
And then there’s scale. Entrepreneurs will say, “Once we scale up, the cost per unit will be this,” but there are so many things that have to happen successfully between proof-of-concept and scaling that it’s often insurmountable. When there’s so much money in the system, it can make it hard to see which companies really deserve funding.
I once covered a company making pizza with robots and the pizza was actually good! But you have to ask, “Do we really need robot pizza?” He solved a problem, but for this vast sum of money. When there’s so much money, people can lose sight of the mission.
Startups will announce they’ve raised money, but you have to ask: Is it real?
AG: I was going to ask about the funding landscape more broadly. It feels like there’s been this pullback after those highs a couple of years ago. How are you seeing that shift play out?
SM: Silicon Valley works in cycles: Sometimes VCs operate with incredible largesse, and sometimes they pull back their purse strings a little bit. A lot of it is luck. When everyone’s getting funding, you’re allowing some subpar companies to keep going far beyond where they should. In that case, even good companies will have a harder time, because all the talent they would normally be able to hire is spread out among all these mediocre companies. So you have to know, where are you in the funding cycle?
Speaking of red flags earlier, companies who throw money around are another one. They want to be first out of the gate and hire the best talent, that seems to never work well. You can see that happening with AI now. Putting all the ethics questions aside and just talking about money, people are going to lose huge investments because it’s not possible for all these companies to sustain their model of doing business.
AG: You’ve also reported on AI. How do you feel about the way journalists are covering it right now?
SM: I think a lot of tough questions are being asked, and that’s great. But there’s also a hysterical component to some of the coverage that isn’t helping. There’s too much focus on the big, far-away thing, like “one day machines will run everything,” and not enough attention to the incremental, scary things that AI will make commonplace. Many of the problems that we have already, like tracking or income inequality, can be intensified by AI.
Those are less sexy, but more pernicious. Reporters need to work hard to make their stories compelling without relying on that super-scary, futuristic stuff.
AG: Has covering frontier technologies changed how you personally think about innovation?
SM: I’m open to technology, but with skepticism. I’ll never be the first patient to get anything, but if I feel like it’s working, I’d be open to it.
My mom has dementia. If we could get a chip put in her brain that would help preserve her memory circuits, I would totally urge her to consider it. I think a lot of people are more open to these things than they realize. Think about how crazy LASIK sounded when it first came out: “you’re going to put a laser in my eyeball? No, thank you.” But now it’s routine. If brain implants end up being done regularly and safely, I think people will come around faster than we expect.
Ana Georgescu is a science writer originally from Romania. She is interested in physics and biotech and is currently a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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