I am an avid consumer of business books and love books about corporate history (e.g. ‘The Smartest Guys in the Room’ about ENRON by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind or ‘Losing the Signal’ about Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff – to mention two of my favorites!).

Last week I read ‘Battle for the Bird’ by Kurt Wagner about the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk.

If you want to know

• Why Twitter has always been struggling with sufficiently monetizing its business model and why it might be hard for Elon Musk to change this,
• Why content moderation is incredibly difficult for social media companies (defining and interpreting criteria), why they can never get it right for everyone all the time, which massive and contradictory pressures they face from all kinds of different interest groups, and
• How ‘casual’ billion-dollar business decisions are sometimes taken in the investment community,

then I can highly recommend this book to you!

Kurt Wagner’s writing style is quick-paced and witty (but not too!). Cherry on the cake are some new personal anecdotes about Elon Musk (e.g. taking his mother with him to business meetings, and taking his son ‘X’ with a nanny in tow during the time he stayed in Twitter’s offices during the first period after the takeover).

So, if you have not packed your books for the holidays yet – consider taking this one with you! If you have been on holiday already, I hope you enjoyed it, and don’t worry: this books remains a great read!