Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
by Kate Conger, Ryan Mac
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, tried to back out, and was sued into closing. New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac reconstruct the deal and the year after it from inside sources: the purge of staff, the dismantling of trust and safety, and a platform remade around one owner's grievances and politics.
Core ideas
- Twitter was vulnerable before Musk arrived: a drifting board and leadership more focused on extracting a price than on the company's future effectively invited the takeover.
- Musk's free-speech absolutism was selective, protecting his own speech and allies while punishing critics, journalists and employees who crossed him.
- Gutting trust and safety and most of the staff destroyed the platform's real asset, a credible shared information space advertisers would pay to sit next to, and converted it into a political instrument.
Published2024
Pages480
ISBN9780593656136
ReadOct 2026
