Character
Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter Hardcover – September 17, 2024
by Kate
Conger (Author), Ryan Mac (Author)
Named a Best
Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews
“Riveting .
. . Character Limit offers a telling lesson in the cost of getting everything
you want.” —The Washington Post
“You
couldn’t hope for a better ringside seat on the unfolding drama . . .
[Character Limit] is a triumph.” —The Guardian
“Masterful
in how it paints a picture and puts you in the room with the famous
entrepreneur . . . Character Limit is a page turner.” —Forbes
Rising star
New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the
first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented
takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political,
social, and financial fallout
The
billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become inextricable from
the social media platform that until 2023 was known as Twitter. Started in the
mid-2000s as a playful microblogging platform, Twitter quickly became a vital
nexus of global politics, culture, and media—where the retweet button could
instantly catapult any idea to hundreds of millions of screens around the
world, unleashing raw collective emotion like nothing else before. While its
founder had idealistically dreamed of building a "digital town
square," he detested Wall Street and never focused on building a
profitable business.
Musk joined
the platform in 2010 and, by 2022, had become one of the site’s most
influential users, hooking over 80 million followers with a mix of
provocations, promotion of his companies, and attacks on his enemies. 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 the survival of democracy and the human race
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, made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company for the
unimaginable sum of $44 billion dollars. Backed into a corner, Twitter’s board
accepted his offer—but Musk quickly changed his mind, forcing Twitter to sue
him to 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? Before long
Twitter would be gone for good, replaced by something radically different, as
Musk remade the company in his own image from the ground up.
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, Conger and Mac follow the inner workings of the company as
Musk lays siege to it, first from the outside as one of its most vocal users,
and then finally from within as a contentious and mercurial leader. Musk has
shared some of his version of events, but Conger and Mac have uncovered the
full story through exclusive interviews, unreported documents, and internal
recordings at Twitter following the billionaire’s takeover. With unparalleled
sources from within and around the company, they provide a revelatory,
three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk
showed up, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless,
sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers.
This is the
defining story of our time told with uncommon style and peerless rigor. In a
world of viral ideas and emotion, who gets to control the narrative, who gets
to be heard, and what does power really cost?
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário