By Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
In a world of viral ideas and emotions, who gets to control the narrative? Who gets to be heard? What does power really cost? This is the story of Elon Musk’s showdown with Twitter. It explores how the richest man on earth came to control one of the world’s most powerful media platforms.
In Character Limit, award-winning reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac unravel this saga. They draw on exclusive interviews, unreported documents and internal Twitter recordings. Their account is revelatory, three-dimensional and definitive. It reveals what really happened when Musk arrived to take over Twitter, spoiling for a brawl. With him came a merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors and bankers, all intent on revolution.
How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter
In part, this is the story of Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, who idealistically dreamed of building a ‘digital town square’ but hated Wall Street and never built a profitable business, and Musk, one of the site’s most influential users with over 70 million followers.
To Musk, Twitter – once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech – had utterly lost its way. Blaming it for the proliferation of what he called the “woke mind virus”, he claimed that the survival of humanity itself depended on the future of the site.
In January 2022, Musk began secretly accumulating Twitter stock. By April, he was its largest shareholder, and, soon after, he made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company for the unimaginable sum of $44 billion. Backed into a corner, Twitter’s board accepted his offer, only for Musk to change his mind, forcing Twitter to sue him. Drawing on unparalleled sources, this is the defining story of our time told in vivid, cinematic detail.
About the authors
Kate Conger is a technology reporter for the New York Times . She writes about X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and its owner, Elon Musk. In more than a decade of covering the tech industry, she has written about the underground world of hackers, the use of artificial intelligence in autonomous weapons and labor uprisings in the gig economy.
Ryan Mac is a Los Angeles-based technology reporter for the New York Times . He has spent more than a decade reporting on wealth and power in Silicon Valley, first on staff at Forbes , and then at BuzzFeed News , where he was a senior reporter. He led the outlet’s deep reporting on Facebook, which garnered a 2019 Mirror Award and a 2021 George R. Polk Award.
- PUBLISH | Penguin Random House SA |
- ISBN | 9781529914702 |
- RECOMMENDED RETAIL PRICE | R420.00 |
- Classification | Current Affairs |