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Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover may have dominated the news cycle for months, but as Zoe Schiffer’s new book Extremely Hardcore proves, there’s still a lot more to learn.
Schiffer, a veteran tech journalist who worked as a senior reporter at The Verge before becoming managing editor at Platformer, meticulously details the chaos before and after Musk’s much-covered coup, surfacing new details of the takeover.
The book starts with Musk’s very first tweet—“This is actually me,” he wrote, after being impersonated by another user—and runs all the way through the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, misinformation about which ran rampant on the platform. Along the way, it details Musk’s stealth Twitter stock purchases, his failed attempt to get out of his purchase agreement, the botched rollout of Twitter Blue, and much more. The book is based on interviews with more than 60 employees and “hundreds of pages of internal memos, whistleblower complaints, and court documents,” according to Schiffer’s foreword.