Character Limit

byKate Conger, Ryan Mac, Edoardo Ballerini (Read by)

How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

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The billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become inextricable from a social media platform that until 2023 was known as Twitter. Started in the early 2000s as a playful microblogging platform, Twitter quickly became a vital nexus of global politics, culture, and media—where the retweet function could instantly catapult anyone or any idea to hundreds of millions of the screens around the world, unleashing raw viral emotion like nothing else before it. Known as a "digital town square," it struggled to make money.

Musk joined the platform in 2010 and became one of the site’s biggest users by 2022, touting over 80 million followers who regularly engage with his mix of provocative and absurd remarks. To Musk, Twitter—once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech—had badly lost its way. He blamed it for the proliferation of what he called the “woke mind virus” and claimed that democracy itself depended on the future of the site. In January of 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. Twitter’s board responded with a poison pill strategy to block the deal but reversed course, suing Musk to finally close the deal in October. The richest man on earth controlled one of the most powerful media platforms in the world—but at what price?

The story of the showdown between Musk and Twitter and his eventual takeover of the company is unlike anything in business or media that has come before. In vivid, cinematic detail reminiscent of the classic Barbarians at the Gate, investigative journalists Conger and Mac follow the inner workings of the company as Musk laid siege to it, first from the outside as one of its most vocal users and then finally from within as its contentious and mercurial leader. Musk has shared some of his side of the story, but Conger and Mac have uncovered the truth, using unparalleled sources from both within and around the company to provide a revelatory, three-dimensional look at what really happened when Musk showed up with a cadre of ruthless lawyers, VCs, and bankers.

Character Limit is the definitive business book of the 2020s — a meticulously reported tale of tech-industry hubris, narcissism, and egomania collapsing in on itself at the end of the ZIRP era. Alternately shocking, thrilling, tragic, and hilarious, it perfectly encapsulates the entrenched and warring cultures of Silicon Valley, the deceptively thorny problems of the social-media age, and the fine line between stupidity and genius straddled by a generation of tech entrepreneurs. This book will be read for decades to come, both as the definitive documentation of the end of an era, and as a how-not-to manual for future generations of managers and investors, not to mention M&A bankers and lawyers

Max Read, author of the newsletter READ MAX

About Kate Conger

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 labour uprisings in the gig economy. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781804948118
  • Length: 920 minutes
  • Price: £16.00
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