About this item
Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways. Now Nick Bilton of the New York Times takes readers behind the scenes with a narrative that shows what happened inside Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds. This is a tale of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles as the four founders - Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass - went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities, featured on magazine covers, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Times list of the worlds most influential people. Biltons exclusive access and exhaustive investigative reporting - drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails - have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of fame, influence, and power. He also captures the zeitgeist and global influence of Twitter, which has been used to help overthrow governments in the Middle East and disrupt the very fabric of the way people communicate.
About the Author
Nick Bilton is Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he writes about politics, technology, business, and culture, and a contributor at CNBC. He was also a columnist for The New York Times for almost a decade.
In his New York Times bestseller Hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton gave readers an astonishingly reported, riveting, and impeccably crafted story of the politics and power struggles behind the founding of Twitter. Now in AMERICAN KINGPIN: The Epic Hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, Creator of the Silk Road (Portfolio; 5/2/17) Bilton turns his remarkable talent for investigative journalism to the story of Ross Ulbricht, the notorious and enigmatic founder of a drug empire called Silk Road.
Bilton's columns and articles for The New York Times and Vanity Fair have led to investigations by the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Congress. In late-2011, Bilton began questioning the Federal Aviation Administration's arcane rules banning Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. His reporting helped push the F.A.A. to initiate a committee reviewing its rules.
