(Portfolio, $29)
Are all social-media moguls actually anti-social? asked Rich Jaroslovsky in Bloomberg.com. Compared with the feuding depicted in Nick Bilton’s “absorbing, occasionally appalling account” of Twitter’s genesis, even Facebook’s early days suddenly look tame. Though former CEO Jack Dorsey is commonly credited as Twitter’s principal inventor, three other Silicon Valley strivers clearly played equally significant roles in launching the massively successful micro-blogging site that recently enjoyed a blockbuster initial public offering. Dorsey, Evan “Ev” Williams, Christopher “Biz” Stone, and Noah Glass were buddies in 2006 when they abandoned an ailing startup to launch a new social-networking website. Alas, as Twitter grew, clashing personalities and ambitions unleashed a barrage of backstabbing.
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Bilton tips the scales a bit too far, said Hannah Kuchler in the Financial Times. He makes Williams a shrewd, much-loved leader and casts Dorsey as a math-challenged narcissist who fails to address Twitter’s early technical flaws, then tries to cast himself as a new Steve Jobs. Bilton’s hammy flourishes “climax at the end,” when Bilton imagines astronaut and Twitter star Chris Hadfield gazing down from space and seeing Williams engaging with his children while Dorsey paces a lonely $10 million bachelor pad. That “cringe-worthy” moment aside, Hatching Twitter proves far more entertaining than the average startup chronicle, mining a story so rich “it is destined to be told and retold.”
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