Nick Bilton – författare

Random House presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of American Kingpin by Nick Bilton, read by Will Damron.From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road.In 2011, Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched "a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts (after the Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where you could buy or sell drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, guns, grenades, and poisons.The Silk Road soon caught the attention of the Feds, who embarked on an epic two-year manhunt for the site''s proprietor. Ulbricht, in the meantime, struggled to maintain control of his double life and his marketplace, which he originally started to prove that legalising drugs could make society safer. He gradually abandoned his libertarian ideals to rule Silk Road with increasingly authoritarian force. At one point, he engaged the services of hired hit men to take out employees he felt had wronged him. Soon, some of the Federal agents who were supposed to be hunting for Ulbricht were lured into the dark world and switched sides to join him.This is a true-life thriller about ambition gone awry, spurred on by the defining clash of our time: the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralised web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Bilton''s dazzling rendering and gift for narrative make for an endlessly fascinating drama.

''A tale of Machiavellian plots and coups d''etat, it''s just all so gripping'' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2THE ULTIMATE 21ST CENTURY BUSINESS STORYSince 2006, Twitter has grown from the accidental side project of a failing internet start-up, to a global icon that by 2013 had become an $11.5bn business. But the full story of Twitter''s hatching has never been told before.In his revelatory new book, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton takes readers behind the scenes of Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds, and inside the heads of the four hackers who created it: ambitious millionaire Evan Williams; tattooed mastermind Jack Dorsey; joker and diplomat Biz Stone; and Noah Glass, the shy but energetic geek who invested his whole life in Twitter, only to be kicked out and expunged from the company''s official history.Combining unprecedented access with exhaustive investigative reporting, and drawing on hundreds of sources, documents and internal emails, New York Times'' bestseller HATCHING TWITTER is a blistering drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles. A business story like no other, it will shock, expose and inspire.