Nick Bilton | |
|---|---|
 Nick Bilton in 2014 | |
| Born | England |
| Nationality | British-American |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, author and filmmaker |
| Employer | Vanity Fair |
| Notable work | Hatching Twitter (2013), American Kingpin (2017), Fake Famous (2021) |
Nick Bilton is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He is currently a special correspondent at Vanity Fair.
Bilton was born in England, but later moved to the United States and attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. [1]
Bilton worked at The New York Times from 2003 to 2016, as a design editor in the newsroom and a researcher in the research and development labs. Before he left, he was a technology columnist and the lead writer for the Bits blog. [2]
In 2016, he left The New York Times to become a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, [3] where he writes features and columns. He co-wrote the 2015-2019 Vanity Fair New Establishment List. [4]
In 2021, HBO released Fake Famous , a documentary film Bilton wrote, directed and produced about social media and influencer culture. [5]
In 2016, Bilton fought, and won, a 1st Amendment lawsuit when he was deposed to testify in a class action lawsuit against Twitter, after an article he wrote in Vanity Fair, “Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey. Will It Work?” [6] alleged that the company knowingly deceived investors in 2015 about its users’ daily and monthly engagement with the site. [7]
Bilton is the author of three books: I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted (2010), [8] Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (2013), [9] and American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road (2017).
Hatching Twitter told the story of the Twitter's early days and its four founders—Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone—who are portrayed as "mediocrities, narcissists and mopers who seem to spend as much time on scheming, self-promotion and self-destruction as on anything else", according to Tim Wu's review in the Washington Post . [10] The book was optioned by Lionsgate in 2013, yet as of 2023 no series has been produced. [11]
American Kingpin, published in May 2017, tells the story of the Silk Road marketplace, its founder Ross Ulbricht (who went by "Dread Pirate Roberts"), and how U.S. law enforcement arrested him. [12] [13] In June 2017, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the Coen brothers and Steven Zaillian were adapting the book into a movie. [14]
| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Biggest Heist Ever [15] [16] | No | No | Yes |
| 2021 | Fake Famous | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2019 | The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley | No | No | Yes |
Parkland is a city in northern Broward County, Florida, United States. It is a suburb of Miami and located 42 miles (68 km) north of the city. As of the 2020 census, the population of Parkland was 34,670. Parkland is part of the Miami metropolitan area, which was home to 6,166,488 people in 2020.
Vanity Fair is an American monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring (1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, enabling her to advance her causes.
William Langewiesche is an American author and journalist who was also a professional airplane pilot for many years. Since 2019, he has been a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he was a correspondent for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines for twenty-nine years. He is the author of nine books and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is a public high school in Parkland, Florida, United States. Established in 1990 as part of the Broward County Public Schools district and named after the writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, it was the only public high school in Parkland, serving almost the entire city as well as a small section of neighboring Coral Springs.
Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and programmer, who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2015 until 2021, as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairman of Block, Inc.. He is also the founder of Bluesky.
Noah Glass is an American technology entrepreneur and software developer, whose early work included launching Twitter and Odeo, a podcasting company that closed in 2017. Glass is credited for coining the name "Twitter", which began as "Twttr".
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts." As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 Bitcoins.
David Kirkpatrick is a technology journalist, author, and organizer of technology-oriented conferences. He is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. Published in 2010, Kirkpatrick's book chronicles the history of the company since its inception in 2004 and documents Facebook's global impact. Formerly Senior Editor of Internet and Technology at Fortune magazine, Kirkpatrick was until the end of 2022 the editor-in-chief of Techonomy Media Inc., a tech-focused conference company which he founded in 2011.
Ross William Ulbricht is an American serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013. The site operated as a hidden service on the Tor network and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal products and services. Ulbricht ran the site under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", after the fictional character from The Princess Bride.
The history of Twitter, later known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Peter Hamby is an American political journalist. He is the host of Good Luck America at Snapchat and a contributing writer for Puck News and Vanity Fair. He began his journalism career at CNN. Hamby has been described as an early adopter among political journalists of social media. Hamby won an Emmy Award in 2012 for his role in CNN's Election Coverage and an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2017 for his political coverage on Snapchat, which pioneered the use of mobile-first vertical video in journalism.
Wonder is a 2017 American comedy-drama directed by Stephen Chbosky, who co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Conrad and Jack Thorne. It is based on the 2012 novel by R. J. Palacio and stars Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Jacob Tremblay, Mandy Patinkin, and Daveed Diggs.
Cassie Pappas is an American television writer, screenwriter and playwright. She has worked on the Apple TV+ dystopian drama Silo, the Netflix crime drama Griselda (miniseries), the FX drama series Tyrant and the Showtime series The L Word. She is currently working on the upcoming Netflix series Hatching Twitter based on the book by Nick Bilton.
Jack Emerson Davis is an American author and distinguished professor of history in Florida. He holds the Rothman Family Endowed Chair in the Humanities and teaches environmental history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida. In 2002-2003, he taught on a Fulbright award at the University of Jordan in Amman, Jordan.
Never Again MSD is an American student-led political action committee for gun control that advocates for tighter regulations to prevent gun violence. The organization, also known by the Twitter hashtags #NeverAgain, and #EnoughIsEnough, was formed by a group of twenty students attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida at the time of the deadly shooting in 2018, in which seventeen students and staff members were killed by the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, who was a 19-year-old former student of the school and was armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle. The organization started on social media as a movement "for survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting" using the hashtag #NeverAgain. A main goal of the group was to influence that year's United States mid-term elections, and they embarked on a multi-city bus tour to encourage young people to register to vote.
Jaclyn Corin is an American activist against gun violence. She survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018. She is one of the co-founders of March for Our Lives and the organizer of a student protest to Tallahassee, Florida. She has also been a vocal critic of politicians funded by the National Rifle Association.
Kyle Kashuv is an American conservative activist. He survived the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and subsequently advocated for gun rights, notably in opposition to his fellow survivors' March for Our Lives movement.
Silk Road is a 2021 American crime thriller film, written for the screen and directed by Tiller Russell based on the Rolling Stone article "Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht's Big Fall" by David Kushner. The film stars Jason Clarke, Nick Robinson, Alexandra Shipp, Jimmi Simpson, Paul Walter Hauser, Darrell Britt-Gibson, and Will Ropp. It is based on the true story of Ross Ulbricht who develops a website on the darknet, an act which attracts the attention of the FBI and DEA who send in federal agent Richard "Rick" Bowden, a fictional composite of real life DEA Agent Carl Force and US Secret Service Special Agent Shaun Bridges, both of whom were convicted of felonies related to theft of assets in the investigation of Ulbricht, to bring down his empire.
The Kingpin is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He was created by Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez. The character debuted in Edge of Spider-Verse issue #2 as part of the 2014–15 "Spider-Verse" comic book storyline as the archenemy of Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman, continuing into the ongoing series Spider-Gwen that began in 2015. The "Kingpin" name is a reference to the crime lord title in Mafia slang nomenclature.
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