
Extremely Hardcore
Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
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Narrated by:
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Jaime Lamchick
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By:
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Zoë Schiffer
About this listen
"Schiffer offers a detailed look under the smoke-filled hood... deploying a crisp, matter-of-fact style to excellent effect."—The New York Times
"A sharp and deeply sourced fly-on-the-wall account... packed with original reporting."—Financial Times
Before he conceived of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk flexed his control and influence during his unprecedented, $44 billion buyout of Twitter. This is the stunning true story of how Musk managed to upend the world's largest free speech platform through sheer, unilateral force—and what that means for the protection of power in the modern age.
When Elon wrested the app formerly known as Twitter out of the hands of its investors in 2023, his goals for what was previously known as the world’s digital town square were rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. "I didn’t do it to make more money,” Musk insisted. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.”
Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone in an unprecedented, unsolicited, and unilateral buyout. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees and thousands of pages of internal documents and Slack messages, WIRED journalist Zoë Schiffer delivers the singularly gripping, blow-by-blow saga of the infighting, mass layoffs, and culture wars that followed.
More than just a corporate saga, Extremely Hardcore is a high-stakes story of power, obsession, and ego—an unfiltered look at what happens when the world’s richest man buys one of its most influential platforms and bends it to his will.
©2024 Zoë Schiffer (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Schiffer offers a detailed look under the smoke-filled hood... deploying a crisp, matter-of-fact style to excellent effect." — The New York Times
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- The Shattering of Elon Musk
- By: Faiz Siddiqui
- Narrated by: André Santana
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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At a moment when America’s tech gods are more influential than ever, Hubris Maximus is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of lionizing magnetic leaders. Washington Post journalist Faiz Siddiqui offers a gripping, detailed portrait of a singularly messy and lucrative period in Musk’s career, as well as a case study in the power of using one’s platform to shape the public narrative in a world that can’t turn away from its screens.
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intriguing
- By Avox on 04-24-25
By: Faiz Siddiqui
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Careless People
- A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
- By: Sarah Wynn-Williams
- Narrated by: Sarah Wynn-Williams
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.
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Only a few hours in
- By Cody Konior on 03-24-25
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Owned
- How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
- By: Eoin Higgins
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and new journalism. In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence. Their cronies are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—once known as idealistic and left-leaning voices, now beneficiaries of Silicon Valley largesse. Together, this new alliance aims to exploit the failings of traditional journalism and undermine the very idea of an independent and fact-based fourth estate.
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More of a screed than an analysis
- By Jamie on 03-01-25
By: Eoin Higgins
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The Fund
- Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
- By: Rob Copeland
- Narrated by: Rob Copeland, Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Dalio does not want you to listen to this audiobook. Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles.
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Best finance book I've read in years
- By Aaron on 12-16-23
By: Rob Copeland
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Black Pill
- How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
- By: Elle Reeve
- Narrated by: Elle Reeve
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right.
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Great story — uneven performance
- By SSG on 08-19-24
By: Elle Reeve
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House of Huawei
- The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
- By: Eva Dou
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.
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Good description of how China understood the critical importance of telecom technology before other countries in the west
- By Juan C. Rodriguez on 02-19-25
By: Eva Dou
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Becoming Steve Jobs
- The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
- By: Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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There have been many books - on a large and small scale - about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others. Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half genius, half jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike.
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"Design is How it Works" -SJ
- By Cynthia on 03-29-15
By: Brent Schlender, and others
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Twilight of Democracy
- The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
- By: Anne Applebaum
- Narrated by: Anne Applebaum
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else.
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Modern Dictators & President who wants to be them
- By AJ on 07-23-20
By: Anne Applebaum
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Elon Musk
- Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
- By: Ashlee Vance
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.
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The best of competence porn
- By Tristan on 08-20-16
By: Ashlee Vance
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The Art of Invisibility
- The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data
- By: Kevin Mitnick, Robert Vamosi, Mikko Hypponen
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Like it or not, your every move is being watched and analyzed. Consumers' identities are being stolen, and a person's every step is being tracked and stored. What once might have been dismissed as paranoia is now a hard truth, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility".
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Limited value for the average person
- By James C on 10-14-17
By: Kevin Mitnick, and others
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Elon Musk
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Jeremy Bobb, Walter Isaacson
- Length: 20 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.
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megalomania on display
- By JP on 09-12-23
By: Walter Isaacson
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Going Infinite
- The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Michael Lewis
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
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really expected more rigor from Michael Lewis
- By Wowhello on 10-04-23
By: Michael Lewis
What listeners say about Extremely Hardcore
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- Eve Olsen
- 07-18-24
Riveting and engagingly performed
It was so interesting, well researched, and fun to listen to. Recommended. Get this book!
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- exBFF
- 02-27-24
I hesitated…but single I bought this
Like many now former Twitter users, I’ve had enough Elon to last a lifetime. But the author has created such an incredible, engaging narrative.
We saw all of this play out in public, but this fills in so much detail and ties together what may have seemed to be disparate events.
The whole book was like spending a great weekend with a good friend you haven’t seen in a while and kicking it off with “so, have you heard this one…”
I’m genuinely gonna miss it now. Great job Zoe!!
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- C.Schillings~
- 03-20-24
THE EMPERORS NEW CLOTHES
A very illuminating listen! This book is worh considerable exploration for anyone else out there still pulling together the more bizzaro pieces of the assymetrical jigsaw puzzle of the last few years on the planet weird many of us have been witnessing and expierencing in our discourses via social media platforms online and the resulting dangers which now almost routinely spill offline in one form or another.
Having come a long way since his ode to chocolate milk tweet daze, mr musks more noxious contributions to this increasingly extreme, toxic enviroment is on full display here in Zoe Schiffers articulate, on point writing, tieing it together with musks very own words, texts, proclamations & decrees, letting him speak for the public record himself. (See also the deffinition of megalomania, Icarus lament, further exploration of terminal Uniqueness, ect. ect. for more on all that.) So it should come as no suprise to any of us, really, that this self proclaimed in house power tweeter and so called business genuis would aquire the site formerly known as Twitter and then promptly go about dismantling it into his very own "special purpose vehicle" (the quotes are his own💩) BUT that he'd do it withsuch publicly spectacular self destructive aplomb often left me marveling in bemused horror as I listened.
EXAMPLE: On a whim still a mystery to many of us, mr musk makes an abrupt u turn in his private jet, already enroute to Christmas holiday in Texas, and instead directs it to Sacremento to then rent a Toyaota Corrola to dismantle and transport Twitters back up servers himself, along with his brother, security detail and a pocket knife, taking up the better part of the holiday is but just one of the many baffling tidbits from Ms. Schiffers book that raise a red flag. There are many many more, just bristling with them really but by all means check them out for yourself in the book.
There's a cautionary tale here somewhere I'm almost certain but I just don't think we've seen it all play out in full just yet to reveal whatever it'd be.
Well crafted piece of journalism here with good narration, often using the business magnates very own megaphone along the way in the tellong. I certainly look forward to reading more of Zoe Schiffers published work as well!
✌️🤠
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- Mike B.
- 03-06-24
A snapshot of a moment in time without any real conclusion. And that's great!
I enjoyed this one and it makes a great companion to Hatching Twitter, the only other Twitter book I've listened to/read. It is well researched and moves at a fast pace. Would recommend to anyone who is not a Elonstan.
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- Michael Goode
- 02-23-24
Excellent synopsis of what Musk has done to Twitter
There are few important details that Zoe misses and it is engagingly written and well read.
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- Writingmom
- 03-15-24
Essential to Understand What Happened to Twitter
The narration is excellent. The book lays out what happened to kill Twiier and birth X. Listening to every detail, in chronological order is helpful.
when teaching a class on the business disaster, this should be the text book.
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- DJ
- 02-15-24
Almost word for word rehashing of Walter Isaacson’s book.
Don’t waste your credit. Just buy Isaacson’s book on Elon instead. Twitter is extensively covered. Hard pass on this one.
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- jeff holyoak
- 05-01-24
Extremely biased
With full understanding that the author is telling the story from the perspective of the tweeps and not Musk, she is extremely biased at every turn. By the end of it I feel it lacks any journalistic integrity as she refuses to portray Elon as anything but evil. Not saying she needed to paint rosy picture where one wasn’t, but to essentially portray every event as old Twitter was great and Elon and the “Goons” screwed it all up makes this nothing more than a hit piece. If you love Elon, you’ll hate the book. If you hate Elon, you’ll love the book. But if you want an unbiased accounting of what happened inside of Twitter post Elon acquisition you won’t really get it here. It’s unfortunate as the author has good insights and contacts to have told the story well, but she chose to do nothing but attack on virtually every page.
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- WuZetian
- 08-14-24
Not impartial
The author makes it obvious she can't stand Musk through snide comments, criticism and her choice to tell only negative stories. A biography should be balanced and impartial.
And there is no such thing as "hate speech." That's a concept created to silence people. It's OK to mock, criticize and insult people, places, religions, or ideas. Musk allows free speech and X is one of the very few places left that does.
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- Jose Luis Matus
- 09-30-24
Recycled Insights: A Familiar Take on Elon Musk
If you’ve already read Walter Isaacson’s biography on Elon Musk, you won’t find much new here. The stories are the same, without any deeper insights or fresh revelations to make it stand out
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