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Rising star New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk's unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal's seismic political, social, and financial fallout.

The billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become inextricable from the social media platform that until 2023 was known as Twitter. Started in the mid-2000s as a playful microblogging platform, Twitter quickly became a vital nexus of global politics, culture, and media-where the retweet button could instantly catapult any idea to hundreds of millions of screens around the world, unleashing raw collective emotion like nothing else before. While its founder had idealistically dreamed of building a "digital town square," he detested Wall Street and never focused on building a profitable business.

Musk joined the platform in 2010 and, by 2022, had become one of the site's most influential users, hooking over 80 million followers with his mix of provocative posts, promotion of his companies, and attacks on his enemies. To Musk, Twitter - once known for its almost absolute commitment to free speech - had badly lost its way. He blamed it for the proliferation of what he called the "woke mind virus" and claimed that the survival of democracy and the human race itself depended on the future of the site. In January of 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 dollars. Backed into a corner, Twitter's board accepted his offer-but Musk quickly changed his mind, forcing Twitter to sue him to close the deal in October. The richest man on earth controlled one of the most powerful media platforms in the world-but at what price? Before long Twitter would be gone for good, replaced by something radically new and