How did Elon Musk ruin Twitter? Authors will explain at Vancouver Writers Fest event

A day, heck, a minute doesn’t go by where we don’t hear about billionaire disrupter and Donald Trump’s biggest supporter Elon Musk.

An omnipresent friend and funder of Trump — he spent more than a quarter of a billion U.S. dollars to back the President-elect and other Republican candidates in the U.S. election — Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and turned it into X, a free-for-all of disinformation and a MAGA megaphone.

With that overwhelming support, Musk has bought himself into the very, very inner circle of Trumpland and is poised to be given power within the U.S. government. As well, he is working on making moves internationally with his unabashed boosterism on X for Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.

How did all this happen?

How did Twitter become such a dark place?

New York Times reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, the authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, will attempt to explain at a Vancouver Writers Fest Books & Ideas event on Jan. 17? at 7:30 p.m. at the Revue Stage on Granville Island.

With sources from within and around the company, Conger and Mac tell the story behind Musk’s?takeover of Twitter.

“Given the results of the November election, and Elon Musk’s influence over the President-elect and the social network that helped to get him elected, I wanted to give space to the journalists who have devoted so much time, research and space to his meteoric and deeply worrying rise to power,” Leslie Hurtig the artistic director for the Vancouver Writers Fest said.

“Ryan Mac and Kate Conger have each spent over a decade reporting on the tech industry and the wealth and overwhelming power of Silicon Valley. Together, they expertly navigated the behind-the scenes story of Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his fragile, malicious nature that now makes his influence over the President-elect entirely alarming.”

Mac and Conger will be in conversation with CBC journalist?Kathryn Gretsinger?for the Vancouver event.

Dgee@postmedia.com