Extremely Hardcore, Zoe Schiffer
Extremely Hardcore, Zoe Schiffer
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Extremely Hardcore
Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

Author: Zoë Schiffer

Narrator: Jaime Lamchick

Unabridged: 8 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 02/13/2024


Synopsis

"Schiffer offers a detailed look under the smoke-filled hood... deploying a crisp, matter-of-fact style to excellent effect." — The New York Times

"A sharp and deeply sourced fly-on-the-wall account... packed with original reporting." — Financial Times

Before he conceived of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk flexed his control and influence during his unprecedented, $44 billion buyout of Twitter. This is the stunning true story of how Musk managed to upend the world's largest free speech platform through sheer, unilateral force—and what that means for the protection of power in the modern age.

When Elon wrested the app formerly known as Twitter out of the hands of its investors in 2023, his goals for what was previously known as the world’s digital town square were rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. "I didn’t do it to make more money,” Musk insisted. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.”

Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone in an unprecedented, unsolicited, and unilateral buyout. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees and thousands of pages of internal documents and Slack messages, WIRED journalist Zoë Schiffer delivers the singularly gripping, blow-by-blow saga of the infighting, mass layoffs, and culture wars that followed.

More than just a corporate saga, Extremely Hardcore is a high-stakes story of power, obsession, and ego—an unfiltered look at what happens when the world’s richest man buys one of its most influential platforms and bends it to his will.

About The Author

Zoë Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer, where she covers Twitter, X Corp., and Elon Musk. Previously, she was a senior reporter at The Verge, where she reported on the labor movement in Silicon Valley. Her work has been featured in New York, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox. She’s appeared on CNN, NBC, CNBC, and the BBC.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dharini on February 15, 2024

It’s a strangely exciting experience to have a part of your life codified in a book. The slack messages, the emails quoted in this book are ones I received. I lived through the ordeal outlined here so it will always have a special place on my bookshelf. Objectively, the book is very well sourced, co......more

Goodreads review by Sebastian on February 20, 2024

Very solid chronicle of Musk's takeover of Twitter (so far). It has a good pace, many details, and a reasonable level of objectivity. The main drawback is that ... if you were paying attention to publicly available information, you would learn very little new. In fact, I was really surprised that Pla......more

Goodreads review by Forrest on May 16, 2024

An engaging and in-depth account of musks time as the owner of twitter, now X. I was interested in reading this after finishing Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk. That book touched briefly on the start of Musk’s takeover, but ended before a lot of the juicy stuff. This book did a great job coverin......more

Goodreads review by Blake on April 07, 2024

The definitive book on the Twitter->Saga. Well-reported, lots of good access, and actually covers details and things that you wouldn’t necessarily know even if you closely followed this mess as it unfolded in real time.......more

Goodreads review by Lora on February 17, 2024

When the events in this book were unfolding, I mostly followed them through Schiffer's blogs and articles on Platformer. To some degree, this book is reliving that drip-feed of real time news in an all at once deluge. But there is also room to breathe now and to marvel at the amount of corporate dam......more


Quotes

"Schiffer offers a detailed look under the smoke-filled hood... deploying a crisp, matter-of-fact style to excellent effect."
The New York Times

“Schiffer … has become one of the most indispensable chroniclers of the chaos inside [Twitter].”
The Washington Post

"Extremely Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer, is a sharp and deeply sourced fly-on-the-wall account...It’s also packed with original reporting; Schiffer single-handedly broke a great deal of news on Twitter’s inner workings herself."
Financial Times

"Zoë Schiffer has the wonderfully gossipy and perfectly timed story on what's happening in the company formerly known as Twitter. As much as this book is of the moment, it's also a story of the ages, one of hubris, hero worship, and ultimately, the destruction of a company that should have been a public good."
Bethany McLean, coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room, All the Devils are Here, and The Big Fail

“It used to be said that Twitter was like a clown car that drove into a goldmine and fell in. Zoë Schiffer’s incredibly written and astonishingly reported book about the Musk era of the world’s craziest company tells the story of a man who took the clown car, strapped a rocket to the back of it, and then slammed it into a wall at 100,000 miles an hour. You simply won’t be able to put this book down.”
Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter

“Twitter was an extraordinary idea that, thanks to incompetent management, never lived up to its promise. Then Elon Musk bought it. Zoë Schiffer’s brilliant book exposes...the malicious idiocy of Musk and his sycophants."
Roger McNamee, tech investor and author of the NYT bestseller Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe