As the curtain falls on 2025, it’s only natural to look back at the stories and ideas that shaped our thinking this year — and for Business Insider staffers, that includes books.
We asked our reporters to share the business, tech, and innovation books that left the biggest impression on them this year. Not all of these titles hit the shelves in 2025, but each offered something valuable: a new perspective, a spark of creativity, or simply a story we couldn’t put down.
Our picks span everything from Big Tech memoirs and Wall Street deep dives to pop culture biographies and reflections on identity and innovation.
Here’s a look at the books that defined our year in reading — and might just inspire your next picks over the holidays and into 2026.
“Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” by Kara Swisher
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Hugh Langley: It’s hard to think of a reporter who’s had a better front-row seat to the history of Silicon Valley than Kara Swisher. “Burn Book” attempts to both chronicle the unstoppable rise of tech and her role as the dogged reporter caught in the frenzy. Lord knows that journalists love stories about journalists, so the latter aspect grabbed me most.
For those more interested in Swisher’s central line of inquiry — how and why did Big Tech end up so cozy with the Trump administration? — “Burn Book” offers a whistle-stop history lesson of how the internet upended the media industry, our relationship to technology — everything, really — and crowned a new generation of eccentric moguls.
For anyone who has followed Swisher’s reporting as closely as I have (she launched Recode the year I got my first job as a tech journalist) it’s not quite an earth-shattering exposè, but eminently readable and chock full of anecdotes — including a particularly weird one about Sergey Brin’s baby shower.
“The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now” by Richard H. Thaler and Alex O. Imas
Samuel O’Brient: As both a fan and scholar of behavioral economics, I was extremely excited when I saw that Richard Thaler would be releasing an updated edition of the book that helped shape the entire discipline.
Its release led to me having a great conversation with both he and Alex Imas about their insights, both old and new, and how much they apply to my work at Business Insider. Behavioral economics is extremely important for anyone seeking to understand the investing world and this book helps illustrate why.
“Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein
Kasia Kovacs: There’s no easy way to sum up this book, but I’ll take a stab: It’s a social and political commentary grown from author Naomi Klein’s frustration with being confused with the “Other Naomi” — Naomi Wolf. But the book covers a lot more ground, too. It’s an exploration of tech and the attention economy, and how our online personas (our shadow selves, or doppelgangers, if you will) and the deep corners of the internet spur misinformation and conspiracy theories.
“Doppelganger” was published two years ago, and in that short time AI has continued to proliferate at a rapid rate. Reading it in 2025, one must wonder about the increasing impact of AI on this spectrum of issues in the online “mirror world.”
“Gwyneth: The Biography” by Amy Odell
Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Daily Front Row
Henry Chandonnet: Hear me out: This biography is 60% delicious pop culture gossip and 40% a stellar business book. After almost entirely quitting acting, Gwyneth Paltrow devoted herself to her wellness brand Goop. There have been peaks and valleys between its boom as a media business, its expansion into beauty and food delivery, and its subsequent bust, marked by layoffs and shutdowns.
Odell made me just as interested in Paltrow the business maven as I was in Paltrow the actor. Her first book on Anna Wintour is great, too, if you’re into the Condé-ology that blew up this year.
“Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War” by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Julia Hornstein: “Unit X” offers up the requisite context a good, serious piece of nonfiction should — the kind a new defense tech beat reporter might artfully deploy when chatting with her editors. It makes the compelling case that the US lost its edge in battlefield tech around the turn of the century as rivals learned to build complex weapons cheaply and quickly. But the strength of the book comes from its pace — the authors realize the stakes only moments before the reader does.
“Unit X” opens with Shah flitting over Iraq’s border aboard an F-16 fighter jet, a technological marvel with a small problem: The aircraft couldn’t display exactly where Shah was. On his next flight, Shah jerry-rigged his own navigation software using cheap commercial tech. The fix worked, catalyzing the authors’ driving purpose — to bring ready-made tech from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill, as they put it, “we had to hack the Pentagon itself.”
“What Do You Do With an Idea?” by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Mae Besom
Melia Russell: The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz once sent this book to my techie husband when our daughter was born. She’s five now, and this was the year the book finally earned its place in the bedtime rotation.
“What Do You Do With an Idea?” follows a child who discovers a strange, slightly unwieldy idea that trails him like a lost puppy. The child worries about what people will think, until he finally decides to nurture the idea. The world is better for it. It’s a quietly powerful read about creativity, courage, and the fragile early days of a big thought.
“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Flatiron Books
Jyoti Mann: Few books this year have captured Big Tech’s inner workings as vividly as this memoir from a former Facebook public policy director.
Reading it through the lens of someone who covers Meta, I was both fascinated and unsettled by the eye-opening details that give us a behind-the-scenes look at the company and dynamics within Meta’s top ranks. The book is a feast of insight — deliciously written and impossible to put down.
“1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How it Shattered a Nation” by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Emma Cosgrove: If you want to feel calmer about the financially precarious moment we find ourselves in now, read about a real crash. Before the SEC, before so many regulations that keep us from financial oblivion, psychics were prolific stock pickers of the day and trading was a cultural phenomenon — a trendy, addictive hobby as much as a stairway to wealth.
Nothing calmed me down about the AI bubble quite like studying The Great Depression and Sorkin’s take is vivid, fast-moving, and about as fun as a financial disaster story can be. Can I hear echoes today? Sure. Do I think we’re on the brink of anything similar? Nah.
“No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson” by Gardiner Harris
Ellen Thomas: This is both a corporate history of an iconic and trusted American heritage brand and an exposé into its long pattern of exploiting that trust in pursuit of maximal profit, no matter the cost to human health and life. The book breaks down J&J’s history of legally and ethically questionable — and frankly dangerous — business practices chapter by chapter, covering a different product and related disaster in each one.
The J&J talcum powder scandal has been well-covered, but I think you’ll find it shocking how many J&J products have caused harm at scale. “No More Tears” is really infuriating and to be honest I had to take a little break from corporate non-fiction after I read it, but ultimately it’s an important and revealing book that reminded me why I do this job.
“Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” by Chris Miller
Meghan Morris: From Intel’s new CEO to US-China export controls, Chris Miller’s prescient 2022 book explains many of 2025’s headlines. The book traces the underpinnings of today’s astronomical wealth creation and sensitive geopolitical questions back decades, through vignettes about people and companies you know and those that have faded from public consciousness.
For tech experts and Luddites alike, this history will inform your understanding of the currency driving much of the world’s economy. Readers gain new appreciation for the technology that powers your iPhone and 401(k) alike — and insights into just how fragile the gazillion-dollar ecosystem is.
