Kate Conger | |
|---|---|
 Conger in November 2024 | |
| Occupations |
|
| Employer | The New York Times |
| Website | Kate Conger - New York Times |
Kate Conger is an American journalist and writer who works for The New York Times . She has previously worked as a reporter at Gizmodo and TechCrunch . She is the co-author of 2024's Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter . [1]
Conger began her career writing for the SF Weekly and the San Francisco Examiner . [2] From 2016 to 2017, Conger worked as a reporter for TechCrunch , covering tech policy and cybersecurity. From 2017 to 2018, she worked as a reporter for Gizmodo . Conger was the first to report on the infamous Google Memo, written by former employee James Damore in which he disparaged Google for policies addressing gender equality. Damore would later sue Google, alleging discrimination against conservative white men in a suit that was ultimately dismissed in 2020. [3] [4]
Conger joined The New York Times as a writer in July 2018. [2] Along with writers Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner, Conger was a 2019 Gerald Loeb Award finalist in beat reporting for their coverage of Andy Rubin, a former Google executive that was paid $90 million in severance to expedite his leaving of the company after credible allegations of sexual harassment. [5] [6]
In September 2024, Conger and co-author Ryan Mac released Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter , which covers Musk's poorly executed $44-billion-dollar acquisition of Twitter. [7] [8] [9]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X, and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. In November 2024, president-elect Donald Trump announced Musk is set to become co-chair of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of November 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$304 billion.
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for nine years and led Google's efforts in creating and promoting the Android operating system for mobile phones and other devices during most of his tenure. Rubin left Google in 2014 after allegations of sexual misconduct, although it was presented as a voluntary departure rather than a dismissal at first. Rubin then served as co-founder and CEO of venture capital firm Playground Global from 2015 to 2019. Rubin also helped found Essential Products in 2015, a mobile phone start-up that closed in 2020 without finding a buyer. In 2019, Rubin was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame.
Bret Steven Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for leading the team that co-created Google Maps and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook, as the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of Salesforce. Taylor was additionally one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Quip. Since 2023, he is the founder of Sierra, chairman of OpenAI, and a board member of Shopify.
Twitter, Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the Vine short video app and Periscope livestreaming service. In April 2023, Twitter merged with X Holdings and ceased to be an independent company, becoming a part of X Corp.
The history of Twitter, later known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Mastodon is a open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, and is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse.
"Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", commonly referred to as the Google memo, is an internal memo, dated July 2017, by US-based Google engineer James Damore about Google's culture and diversity policies. The memo and Google's subsequent firing of Damore in August 2017 became a subject of interest for the media. Damore's arguments received both praise and criticism from media outlets, scientists, academics and others.
The 2018 Google walkouts occurred on November 1, 2018 at approximately 11 am. The walkout had a large number of participants. The employees demanded five concrete changes from the company: an end to forced arbitration; a commitment to end pay inequality; a transparent sexual harassment report; an inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct; and elevate the Chief of Diversity to answer directly to the CEO and create an Employee Representative. A majority of the known organizers have left the company since the walkout and many continue to voice their concerns. Google agreed to end forced arbitration and create a private report of sexual assault, but has not provided any further details about the other demands.
Claire Stapleton is an American writer and marketer known for her involvement in the 2018 Google Walkout for Real Change. She is the author of the newsletter Tech Support.
On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam.
Parag Agrawal is an Indian-American software engineer and businessman who was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from November 2021 to October 2022.
A tweet is a short status update on the social networking site Twitter, officially known as X, which can include images, videos, GIFs, straw polls, hashtags, mentions, and hyperlinks. Around 80% of all tweets are made by 10% of users, averaging 138 tweets per month, with the median user making only two tweets per month.
Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social networking service primarily operated by Bluesky Social, PBC. It was created as a proof of concept for the AT Protocol, a communication protocol for decentralized social networks. The platform is analogous to Twitter, where users can share short text posts, images, and video, and can like, repost, and reply to any given post.
Sriram Krishnan is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Liz Fong-Jones is a site reliability engineer and developer advocate known for labor activism with her contributions to the Never Again pledge and her role in leading Google worker organization efforts. She is the president of the board of directors of the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, which she seeded with her own money. She is Honeycomb's field Chief Technology Officer.
The business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech, framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X, an "everything app".
Ryan Mac is a Vietnamese-American writer and journalist who works for the The New York Times. He has previously worked as a reporter at Buzzfeed News and Forbes. Mac was awarded the 2019 Mirror Award and the 2020 George Polk Award for his reporting on Facebook. He is the co-author of 2024's Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that, despite Yaccarino's accession, was widely attributed to Musk, Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024.
X Corp. is an American technology company headquartered in Bastrop, Texas. Established by Elon Musk in 2023 as the successor to Twitter, Inc., it is a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings Corp., which is itself mostly owned by Musk. The company owns the social networking service X, and has announced plans to use it as a base for other offerings. While the official name of the company and social network is now X, many users and media outlets continue to refer to it as Twitter.
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter is a 2024 book written by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. It covers the controversial takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. Character Limit was published on September 17, 2024, by Penguin Press.