Ben Mezrich (Pan Macmillan)
AT TIMES over the past 18 months of courtship, falling out and eventual forced marriage between the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk and Twitter, the events of his takeover of the platform he calls the “de facto public square” seemed to come straight out of a movie.
Little wonder, then, that author Ben Mezrich has decided to document the chaotic whirlwind that surrounded Musk before, during and after his hostile takeover of Twitter, now called X.
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Mezrich is renowned for churning out business books that are easily translated into Hollywood movies. His book The Accidental Billionaires, about Facebook’s genesis, became the hit movie The Social Network. And his Bringing Down the House, about MIT mathematicians who swindled Las Vegas casinos out of millions, became the film 21.
Undoubtedly, Breaking Twitter will soon get the same treatment. After all, who is a better lead character than Musk himself?
Whether a book written with half an eye on making it easy to turn into a pacy, 90-minute movie is an enjoyable read is another question. Hollywood producers on the lookout for an enticing story will appreciate its casual style and the dramatic prose that can be turned into powerful imagery. But readers wanting to learn what actually happened leading up to and following Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter may do well to read other books, including veteran tech journalist Walter Isaacson’s doorstop of a biography of Musk.
The issues come early. Before we even get into the narrative, the reader is presented with a note “from Bestselling Author Ben Mezrich”, designed to sugar the pill: the book, it turns out, is based on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, but it might not all be true.
“Some dialogue has been reimagined,” Mezrich writes. “The dates of some of the events have been adjusted or compressed.” Composite characters have been created. “At some points… I employ elements of satire,” the author writes, without clarifying what that means for the truth.
Later on in the note, Mezrich comes clean. He says that some of what he writes is “based on my own speculation”, alongside his reporting. Yet it is never clear which is which, so the reader is left confused about the veracity of some of the more outlandish scenes – an issue compounded by Musk’s life being so over the top that fact and fiction often look like they could be interchangeable.
In at least one chapter, which starts “It might have looked something like this” and continues with a cacophony of conditional phrases, it is clear that this is nothing more than the author freestyling. But when those “mights” and “mays” disappear, it is less clear how closely Mezrich is hewing to reality.
And perhaps because of time constraints – given it involved rapidly turning round a story that took place so recently – at times, the style feels like a parody of itself.
Take a tense scene in April 2022 as Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal learns about Musk breaking cover with his takeover bid. This collapses under the weight of clunky prose as text messages become “tiny packets of excited electrified molecules streaming through the air of [Agrawal’s] sleepy neighbourhood and plunging into the sophisticated hunk of Apple engineering nestled in a fold of pocket by his chest”. Hunter S. Thompson this is not.
Breaking Twitter is a confusing book. Whether that is a deliberate move to mimic Musk himself or just an accident is never clear.
It will make a great movie. But as a book, it frequently falls down.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
