Character Limit (Hardcover)

A FINANCIAL TIMES AND NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF 2024

'The abiding question posed by Character Limit is this: is Elon Musk secretly 13 years old?' Private Eye

'[Conger and Mac are] scoop magnets . . . A dramatic, fly-on-the-wall narrative . . . offers insights into how Musk might approach his job helping to run Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency' New York Times

'A deeply reported, revealing and slightly terrifying book that is considerably subtler than its subtitle' Janine Gibson, Financial Times

'You couldn’t hope for a better ringside seat on the unfolding drama. . . As a retelling of exactly what happened and what it felt like to be there, it is a triumph’ Guardian

'The definitive account of how the world’s richest man, in a fit of unbridled vanity and arrogance, took over and destroyed our digital town square' John Carreyrou, bestselling author of Bad Blood

'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.’ New Statesmen

‘Astonishing. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s meticulous, comprehensive reporting turns an opaque mess brutally transparent’ Jia Tolentino, bestselling author of Trick Mirror

‘Gripping… Through fly-on-the-wall reporting, Character Limit takes readers inside Elon Musk's tumultuous Twitter takeover and the disruption of a company, an industry, and the online public square. What a wild ride' Bradley Hope, bestselling author of Billion Dollar Whale

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?

This is the story of the showdown between Elon Musk and Twitter and how the richest man on earth suddenly came to control one of the most powerful media platforms in the world. In Character Limit, award-winning reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac draw on exclusive interviews, unreported documents and internal Twitter recordings to provide a revelatory, three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk showed up to takeover Twitter, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers.

In part, this is the story of Twitter's founder, Jack Dorsey, who idealistically dreamed of building a 'digital town square' but detested Wall Street and never built a profitable business, and Musk, one of the site's most influential users with over 70 million followers. To Musk, Twitter―once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech―had utterly lost its way. Blaming it for the proliferation of what he called the “woke mind virus”, he claimed that the survival of humanity itself depended on the future of the site.

In January 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 for the unimaginable sum of $44 billion. Backed into a corner, Twitter’s board accepted his offer―only for Musk to change his mind, forcing Twitter to sue him.

Drawing on unparalleled sources, this is the defining story of our time told in vivid, cinematic detail.

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.