Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

        紐約時報科技記者，獨家揭露伊隆‧馬斯克收購推特（Twitter）的驚人內幕，深入追查這樁金額高達四百四十億美元的收購案，對政治、社會和金融造成的影響。
 
       推特成立於2000年代中期，這個活絡的微網誌平台，快速躍升為全球政治、文化和媒體的樞紐。其創辦人專注於建構理想中的「數位市政廣場」，對於如何提升公司獲利能力、華爾街的那些交易手法不感興趣，而馬斯克如何摧毀了這個夢想？
 
       伊隆‧馬斯克自2010年起使用推特，隨著個人身價和知名度水漲船高，又經常藉平台發布具挑釁意味、攻擊對手的評論，炒熱公司宣傳，到2022年已在平台上吸引了逾八千萬名粉絲。此時的馬斯克認為，原本堅持言論自由的推特，已嚴重迷失了方向，他聲稱為了捍衛民主和人類生存權，推特必須做出改變。2022年1月起，馬斯克開始祕密收購這間公司的股票，三個月內成為推特最大的股東，他隨後公開表示收購意願，又一度宣布取消收購提議，致使股價暴跌，迫使推特對他提起訴訟才完成這筆交易。作者以電影般的敘事手法，揭露公司內部文件和錄音檔，回顧這起交易案的來龍去脈。
 
       如今這位善變且具爭議性的領導者，徹底掌控、重塑了這個知名平台。本書深入探討這起收購案，及其背後付出的無形代價。(文/博客來編譯)

＂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?

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 2021 George R. Polk Award.