New York Times bestselling author Ben Mezrich pulls back the curtain on the most volatile, complex, and bizarre corporate takeover in history: Elon Musk's acquisition and subsequent occupation of Twitter.
In October 2022, Elon Musk marched through Twitter's front doors carrying a kitchen sink, tweeting a message to his millions of followers: 'let that sink in'. His takeover came with the promise of fundamental changes, but nothing could prepare the company for the chaos to come - brutal, sometimes arbitrary mass firings, an exodus of advertisers and 'blue-tick' celebrities, and a vicious Shakespearean battle for control.
With unique access to Twitter employees and Musk's confidants, this is the astonishing story from all sides, revealing a wealth of new details. Follow the darkly comic, self-inflicted, and sometimes frightening events that led Elon into an emotional downward spiral.
The whole world was watching. Breaking Twitter provides ringside seats to one of the most dramatic and compelling business stories of our time. Elon Musk didn't break Twitter. Twitter broke Elon Musk.
'Uproarious . . . stimulating enough to keep even an unmedicated narcoleptic awake' - Washington Times on The Accidental Billionaires
This is definitive take on the wildest story of the year— the David-vs.-Goliath GameStop short squeeze, a tale of fortunes won and lost overnight that may end up changing Wall Street forever.
Bestselling author Ben Mezrich offers a gripping, beat-by-beat account of how a loosely affiliate group of private investors and internet trolls took down one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street, firing the first shot in a revolution that threatens to upend the financial establishment.
It started on a subreddit forum called WallStreetBets – a meme-filled, freewheeling place where a disparate group of investors shared their shoot-the-moon investment tips, laughed about big losses, and posted diamond hand emojis. Until some members noticed an opportunity in Game Stop – a flailing bricks and mortar video-game retailer – and somehow rode a rocket ship to tens of millions of dollars in earnings overnight, simultaneously triggering unfathomable losses for one of the most respected funds on the street.
In thrilling, pulse-pounding prose, THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK offers a fascinating, never-before-seen glimpse at the outsize personalities, dizzying swings, corporate drama, and underestimated American heroes and heroines who captivated the world during one of the most volatile weeks in financial history. It’s the amazing story of what just happened—and where we go from here.
Charlie Lewis goes on a roller coaster ride of risk, math, and gaming in this middle grade novel that parallels the New York Times bestselling Bringing Down the House, which inspired the movie 21.
Charlie Lewis is a nerd. All he's ever been good at is math-and he's really good at math. So good that he's recruited by a group of kids determined to game the system at the biggest theme park in the world-and win the grand prize. Soon Charlie is caught up in the excitement and thrill of using his math skills for awesomeness…but what's at stake may be more than he's willing to risk. How far will Charlie go for a chance at the ultimate reward?
Charlie is recruited to use his mathematical prowess to discover what happened to a box of stolen moon rocks in this follow up to Bringing Down the Mouse.
Charlie Lewis is really good at math. So good, that he's approached by a mysterious woman who needs his help. The woman is carrying an incredible item: an actual moon rock, one of the most valuable objects on Earth, and she's investigating the theft of a box of moon rocks from NASA's vault at the Johnson Space Center, and believes the stolen rocks are now in the possession of a former astronaut.
Although she claims to work at NASA, Charlie suspects she is something else-but he decides the adventure is too good to pass up. Charlie and the whiz kids go undercover by entering the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's paper airplane contest, and head down to the nation's capital. Working together, they master the principles of aerodynamics, wind science, and gravity to excel in the competition.
Charlie must decide how far he'll go to solve the mystery of the stolen moon rocks; is he willing to betray a new friendship? Or has he unwittingly been drawn into something even bigger than some missing chunks of the moon?
Science fiction becomes reality in this Jurassic Park-like story of the genetic resurrection of an extinct species-the woolly mammoth-by the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel.
"With his knack for turning narrative nonfiction into stories worthy of the best thriller fiction" (Omnivoracious), Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic circle, and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant. Will they be able to turn the hybrid cells into a functional embryo and bring the extinct creatures to life in our modern world?
Along with Church and his team of Harvard scientists, a world-famous conservationist and a genius Russian scientist plan to turn a tract of the Siberian tundra into Pleistocene Park, populating the permafrost with ancient herbivores as a hedge against an environmental ticking time bomb. More than a story of genetics, this is a thriller illuminating the race against global warming, the incredible power of modern technology, the brave fossil hunters who battle polar bears and extreme weather conditions, and the ethical quandary of cloning extinct animals. Can we right the wrongs of our ancestors who hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction-and at what cost?
This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy.
Like "Agent Mulder" of The X-Files, computer programmer and sheriff's deputy Zukowski is obsessed with tracking down UFO reports in Colorado. He would take the family with him on weekend trips to look for evidence of aliens. But this innocent hobby takes on a sinister urgency when Zukowski learns of mutilated livestock, and sees the bodies of dead horses and cattle-whose exsanguination is inexplicable by any known human or animal means.
Along an expanse of land stretching across the southern borders of Utah, Colorado, and Kansas, Zukowski discovers multiple bizarre incidences of mutilations, and suddenly realizes that they cluster around the 37th Parallel or "UFO Highway." So begins an extraordinary and fascinating journey from El Paso and Rush, Colorado, to a mysterious space studies company and MUFON, from Roswell and Area 51 to the Pentagon and beyond; to underground secret military caverns and Indian sacred sites; beneath strange, unexplained lights in the sky and into corporations that obstruct and try to take over investigations. Inspiring and terrifying, this true story will keep you up at night, staring at the sky, and wondering if we really are alone...and what could happen next.
When moonlighting medical students harvesting skin from a corpse for temporary use accidentally take it from the wrong donor, the results are catastrophic: a New York City hospital ward is destroyed in a bloodbath, and an elderly professor, admitted for a routine skin graft, is suddenly the city’s most wanted fugitive.
Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the only ones to suspect something more ominous than a medical procedure gone awry. As the FBI agents investigating the “X-Files”—strange and inexplicable cases the bureau wants to keep hidden—Mulder and Scully are determined to track down the forces they suspect are behind the murders.
While the police hunt the fleeing professor, Mulder and Scully track the skin that was grafted onto him, a trail that leads from the morgue to the headquarters of a cutting-edge biotech company to the jungles of Thailand. Together they begin to uncover an unholy and undeniable alliance between a battle-trained plastic surgeon, international politicians, and a legendary Thai monster known as the Skin Eater.
The bestselling author of Bringing Down the House (sixty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and the basis for the hit movie 21) and The Accidental Billionaires (the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network) delivers an epic drama of wealth, rivalry, and betrayal among mega-wealthy Russian oligarchs-and its international repercussions.Once Upon a Time in Russia is the untold true story of the larger-than-life billionaire oligarchs who surfed the waves of privatization to reap riches after the fall of the Soviet regime: "Godfather of the Kremlin" Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician whose first entrepreneurial venture was running an automobile reselling business, and Roman Abramovich, his dashing young protégé who built a multi-billion-dollar empire of oil and aluminum. Locked in a complex, uniquely Russian partnership, Berezovsky and Abramovich battled their way through the "Wild East" of Russia with Berezovsky acting as the younger man's krysha-literally, his roof, his protector.Written with the heart-stopping pacing of a thriller-but even more compelling because it is true-this story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a rarefied world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky's krysha, Abramovich built one of Russia's largest oil companies from the ground up and in exchange made cash deliveries-including 491 million dollars in just one year. But their relationship frayed when Berezovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin in the media-and had to flee to the UK. Abramovich continued to prosper. Dead bodies trailed Berezovsky's footsteps, and threats followed him to London, where an associate of his died painfully and famously of Polonium poisoning. Then Berezovsky himself was later found dead, declared a suicide.Exclusively sourced, capturing a momentous period in recent world history, Once Upon a Time in Russia is at once personal and political, offering an unprecedented look into the wealth, corruption, and power behind what Graydon Carter called "the story of our age."
When the reclusive mathematician Jeremy Grady is murdered in a subterranean MIT computer lab, it’s up to his estranged twin brother Jack to find out why. What could account for the sliver of ancient ivory that was found lodged in Jeremy’s chest? And what to make of the image found on his computer thumb drive: snakes entwined in a double helix? Thousands of miles away, botanist Sloane Costa is searching the dark tunnels of the Roman Coliseum for ancient plant specimens. But what she finds is even more intriguing: an image of two opposing serpents wrapped in a double helix, and a bronze snake segment that seems to be part of something much bigger. Joining together, Jack and Sloane embark on a search for the truth that leads them on a far-flung journey—from Brazil, India, Peru, and beyond—as they unravel the mystery that links the Seven Wonders of the World, and discover a conspiracy to hide a roadmap to the Garden of Eden. As they get nearer to finding the truth, they are trailed by female assassins, who bear a striking resemblance to the mythological Amazons. Seven Wonders represents bestselling author Ben Mezrich’s return to fiction: it’s a wild ride of a novel with pulse-pounding action and fascinating historical references that will keep listeners captivated.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the films The Social Network and 21— comes the larger-than-life true tale of a group of American college buddies who brilliantly built a billion-dollar online poker colossus based out of the hedonistic paradise of Costa Rica.
One problem: the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them. . . .
Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich's Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world, on par with some of the behemoths of the Internet. At its height, Absolute Poker was an online empire earning more than a million dollars a day, following savvy business strategy and even better luck. Its founders set up their operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica, embracing an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money.
Meanwhile, the gray area of U.S. and international law in which the company operated was becoming a lot more risky, and soon the U.S. Department of Justice had placed a bull's-eye on Absolute Poker. Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.
Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had an idea a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally.Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA past security checkpoints, an electronically locked door with cipher security codes, and camera-lined hallways and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks.But what does one do with an item so valuable that it's illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a possible astronaut really what he seemed?Mezrich has pored over thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts, and NASA documents and has interviewed most of the participants in the crime to reconstruct this Ocean's Eleven-style heist, a madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.From the Hardcover edition.
Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had an idea-a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally.
Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA's headquarters-past security checkpoints, an electronically-locked door with cipher security codes and camera-lined hallways-and help him steal the most precious objects in the world:the moon rocks.
But what does one do with an item so valuable that it's illegaleven to own? And was Thad Roberts-undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a possible astronaut-really what he seemed?
Mezrich has pored over thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts, and NASA documents, and has interviewed most of the participants in the crime to reconstruct the madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity all centered around an Ocean's Eleven style heist that reads like a Hollywood thrill-ride.
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