Extremely Hardcore
Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
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Extremely Hardcore
Narrated by:
Jaime Lamchick
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Jaime Lamchick
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By:
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Zoë Schiffer
About this listen
"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.
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Critic reviews
"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
— 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
A fantastic look at the fall of Twitter
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The “great man” theory that leads people to justify Elon’s actions is really outdated; think this book makes the case for this more than any I have read recently.
Anyone who was an engineer, would have treated the people who actually created the company with so much more respect.
Informative and interesting.
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Chronicle of a slow motion car crash
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Very biased
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