Extremely Hardcore

Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

By: Zoë Schiffer

Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

"Zoë Schiffer has written the definitive book on perhaps the weirdest business story of our time. A fast-paced and riveting account of a hilarious and tragic mess."—Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion “Money Stuff” columnist

“the bird is freed”

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, commentators were rooting for the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX to succeed. Here was a tough leader who could grab back power from Twitter’s entitled workforce, motivate them to get “extremely hardcore,” and supercharge Twitter’s profit and potential. And it was all out of the goodness of his own heart, 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 said. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.”

Once Musk charged into the Twitter headquarters, the command-and-control playbook Musk honed at Tesla and SpaceX went off the rails immediately. Distilling hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone.

You’ll hear from employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace in real-time, seeing years of progress to fight disinformation and hate speech wiped out within a matter of months. There’s the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musk’s inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new boss’s worst instincts. This is the story of Twitter, but it’s also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs.

Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It’s the next best thing to being there, and you won’t have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.

©2024 Zoë Schiffer (P)2024 Penguin Audio

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

“Schiffer … has become one of the most indispensable chroniclers of the chaos inside [Twitter].” — The Washington Post

"Extremely Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer, is a sharp and deeply sourced fly-on-the-wall account...It’s also packed with original reporting; Schiffer single-handedly broke a great deal of news on Twitter’s inner workings herself." — Financial Times

Riveting and engagingly performed

It was so interesting, well researched, and fun to listen to. Recommended. Get this book!

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!!

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.

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.

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!
✌️🤠

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.

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.

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

A book worthy of the far left woke movement

Ms Schiffer has written a book worthy of the far left woke movement. It adds little or nothing to publicly available information and accounts such as the WSJ and Isaacson's 'Elon Musk.'

She (if I may use that pronoun) selects quotes, anecdotes and accounts from the anti-Muskers but rarely, if ever, anything that reflects positively on him. Granted the acquisition was flawed and overpriced but this review is about the tone of the book - the obvious vitriol the author has for Musk, his team and his business instincts and practices. I was really hoping to gain insight into the inner world of the acquisition but I returned the book and will look elsewhere.

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.