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. 

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. 

Zoe Schiffer interviewed 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. Schiffer’s reporting is a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs. 

Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer where she covers Twitter, X Corp., and Elon Musk. Previously, she was a senior reporter at The Verge where she reported on the labor movement in Silicon Valley. Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox. She’s appeared on CNN, NBC, CNBC, and the BBC.

Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor at Stanford Law School