> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 19 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781804948118
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00

Character Limit

How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter





Rising star New York Times investigative tech reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political and financial fallout

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.

  • Published: 19 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781804948118
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00

About the authors

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.

Ryan Mac

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.

Praise for Character Limit

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

Conger and Mac have written an engrossing and detailed history, not just of Elon Musk, but of how we got to a place where the world’s richest man wants to buy the world’s biggest megaphone. This is a story about power, yes, but it's also about how the corrosion of online life and the addictions of social media can come for us all, even the richest man in the world

Jay Caspian Kang, author of THE LONELIEST AMERICANS

Character Limit is a masterclass in investigative reporting. Mac and Conger’s meticulous research provides readers with an unflinching and intimate portrait of Musk’s chaotic decision making and high-stakes power plays, and the far-reaching impact of his reckless actions and ethical lapses on users and society at large. This gripping exposé reveals previously unreported insights into the acquisition, challenging the mainstream narrative of Musk as a visionary tech genius and revealing how he has upended one of the world's most influential social media platforms. With vivid prose, captivating narrative storytelling, and insightful analysis, Character Limit will be the tech book of the year, and is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the intersection of technology, business, and culture—and anyone who seeks to understand the true cost of innovation without accountability

Taylor Lorenz, author of EXTREMELY ONLINE

Engrossing, precise. . . New York Times reporters Conger and Mac collaborate successfully on an ambitious narrative capturing how Musk engineered Twitter’s downfall, set against the vast financial stakes and dehumanizing aspects of the tech economy. . . Compelling fusion of business history and worrisome social narrative

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination

Observer

Character Limit is an absorbing account of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It covers the big themes of modern politics – unrestrained billionaires and the lawyers, bankers and other yes-men who enable them; how social media has degraded the public square and melted the brains of its most enthusiastic users; and the eternal quest to find the border between free speech and hate speech

Helen Lewis, The New Statesmen

A dramatic, fly-on-the-wall narrative

New York Times