In his new book, Battle for the Bird, which comes out today, Kurt Wagner tells the story of the platform that he’s been covering for a decade. As a social media reporter, currently at Bloomberg, Wagner has covered Twitter from its days with a 140-character limit to its ban of a US president. But in order to understand the story of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his overhaul of the platform into X, he argues, you first have to understand the story of its founder, Jack Dorsey. In the years before Musk even put his sink foot in the door, Twitter struggled as a company despite its level of power and influence.
