Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul

Bloomberg journalist Wagner debuts with a riveting account of how “hubris and resentment and naïveté” drove Elon Musk’s tumultuous 2022 takeover of Twitter. Musk’s many missteps are given their expected due, most notably his failure to rein in racist content on the platform, but it’s Wagner’s perceptive portrait of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as an idealist stymied by the demands of capital that’s most revealing. Wagner describes how Dorsey had ambitions to transform Twitter into “the world’s global consciousness, a direct line into the way that people think and communicate and solve problems,” but grew disillusioned with the company after it went public. As a free speech absolutist, Dorsey resented having to curtail offensive tweets to appease advertisers and felt the board of directors’ obsession with profits overlooked Twitter’s value as a social good. Convinced that going private was the only way to escape these constraints, Dorsey, believing Musk shared his vision for the site, successfully persuaded the billionaire to make a bid for the company. The novelistic narrative captures the chaos of Musk’s first days as CEO—which were characterized by conflicting directives and widespread anxiety about impending layoffs—and the psychological insight into Dorsey provides a refreshing change of pace from the bevy of recent Musk-centric accounts. This is Barbarians at the Gate for the social media age. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA. (Feb.)