Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

nonfiction, business

Penguin Press

release year

Character Limit is an excellent look behind the curtain of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It’s well-written, compelling, and absolutely infuriating.

I put Character Limit on my hold list long before the election in America. It was released mid-September 2024, and the relentless news machine in recent days has made the book feel somewhat dated already. I liked it a lot, but I wonder if it will become a victim to a larger narrative than authors Ryan Mac and Kate Conger could have predicted.

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Recent news included two big stories related to Musk – his role as an advisor in the Trump administration, and the massive migration of users from X to Bluesky (hi!). It’s becoming more difficult to remember how culturally dominant Twitter was before Musk’s takeover.

Character Limit reminds us how far Twitter has fallen from its’ glory days. Gone are the huge moments that defined the news cycle, the memes and jokes that turned into mainstream culture. The far-right, crypto, hustle-culture and other blue checkmark spam dominate the space these days. Musk’s dream of it being “The Everything App” seem to be on indefinite hold while he seeks even bigger societal influence as a passenger in the Trump clown car.

Musk’s persona is on clear display here: a mercurial, thin-skinned nerd who desperately wants to be cool, surrounded by thirsty yes-men. It’s unclear where his genius lies, but as Edward Neidermeyer‘s Ludicrous and Tim Higgins‘ Power Play, Mac and Conger make the case that Musk’s genius lies in getting attention for his products and himself.

It’s clear reading this that Musk and his cronies have little respect for those that work for them. Esther Crawford was famously photographed in a sleeping bag at the office during the early Musk days at Twitter, and is a prominent character in Character Limit. She’s portrayed as a bold, committed, and resourceful team leader scrambling and sacrificing to keep up with Musk’s deadlines, then quickly tossed aside when she falls out of favour over something she was proven right about.

It’s so much worse: random people who don’t even work at Twitter are tasked with making lists of people to fire. Arbitrary targets for staff cuts are set with little understanding of how the cuts will affect the bigger picture. There are several instances of things breaking and remaining broken because the person who could fix it has been fired.

The most cynical thing in the book in my view is Musk’s insistence on breaking rules because he can. The FTC consent decrees don’t matter to him, labour laws are exploited, court decisions are disregarded and hypocrisy is rampant. He waives his right to due diligence when he acquires Twitter, then attempts to back out of the deal under the guise of things that he would have discovered during the process. Employees he fired ‘with cause’ in order to avoid paying severance are forced to incur more than a year of legal action (and the accompanying cost) to recoup what they’re owed. The most memorable theme, a few days after finishing the book, is that Musk and his wealthy friends believe operate in a different universe than the rest of us. Worse, they’re right.

On the topic of his friends: the book includes Jason Calacanis and David Sacks who come off as sad, fully-committed Musk-sycophants. Even Musk biographer Walter Isaacson comes off less-than-great here, chiming in on Twitter UX choices, which Musk uses to validate his poor decision making.

Having followed the events described in this book while they were happening, there wasn’t a lot here that surprised me. It’s well-reported and does an excellent job of describing why Twitter was such a cultural force. Even though Musk severely overpaid for Twitter and under his watch it has become a shell of what it was, Musk’s ownership and manipulation of Twitter is probably the single biggest factor in his new position in the Trump administration. In that case, the $44B that Musk paid for the website may have proven to be a sound investment in the end.