If you’re one of the millions of disaffected former Twitter devotees who’ve lamented how the world’s richest conspiracy-spouting men thoroughly dismantled everything that used to be good about it, this book is for you.
Using interviews with insiders, documents, recordings and publicly available finance information, journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac piece together the process of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform in forensic detail. The authors’ journalistic homework shines through, as well as their style of prose, as they discuss meetings, late-night crisis sessions and the movements and feelings of the characters. Reading it made me feel like I was sitting there next to them the entire way.
Musk undoubtedly has vision and ambition. This book challenges the mystique that enshrouds him, from the point of view of what a business genius he is purported to be. Certainly, the debacle of his purchase of Twitter showed that he seems to be someone who treats anything other than unquestioning devotion with scorn. Despite Musk’s platitudes about making Twitter more egalitarian and less elitist, it’s descended into an ugly cesspool.
Character Limit appears to be the most accurate account we have so far about why.
Reviewed by Drew Turney
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.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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 2020 George R. Polk Award.
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