Nick Bilton > Quotes

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. [Steve] Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
(Nytimes article, Sept. 10, 2014)”
― Nick Bilton

“Most people go through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“The press pass and the a title of “journalist” had been replaced by a smart phone and a Twitter account.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Some people are destined for greatness; others fall up a hill to get there.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter

“People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“You type lines of code into a computer, and out comes a world that didn’t exist before. There are no laws here except your laws. You decide who is given power and who is not. And then you wake up one morning and you’re not you anymore. You’re one of the most notorious drug dealers alive. And now you’re deciding if someone should live or die. You’re the judge in your own court. You’re god.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“What he needed was a place where he could be on his laptop for eighteen hours a day and no one would question why he was being antisocial or what he was working on. Which meant he had to go to San Francisco.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“It was a testament to the resilience of humanity. Give a man a tree and he will make it into a boat; give him a leaf and he will curve it into a cup and drink water from it; give him a rock and he will make a weapon to protect himself and his family. Give a man a small box and a limit of 140 characters to type into it, and he will adapt it to fight an oppressive dictatorship in the Middle East.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Over time he learned that the way to have a leg up on everyone else was to anticipate something before it happened and then have the answer to it.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“As she came to a close, she looked at Ross and said, “What is clear is that people are very, very complex and you are one of them. There is good in you, Mr. Ulbricht, I have no doubt, but there is also bad, and what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web

“Each and every day, as we navigate the real world, we leave a billion little fingerprints in our wake. The door handles we touch, the screens we press, and the people we interact with all capture a trace of our being there. The same is true on the Internet. We share pictures and videos on social networks, leave comments on news articles. We e-mail, text, and chat with hundreds of people throughout the day. If there is anyone who left more of those digital fingerprints lying around the Internet than most people, it was Ross Ulbricht. He spent years living on his computer and interacting with people, good and bad, through that machine. Over the course of my research for this book, I was able to gain access to more than two million words of chat logs and messages between the Dread Pirate Roberts and dozens of his employees. These logs were excruciatingly in-depth conversations about every moment and every decision that went into creating and managing the Silk Road.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“Even though all these people were dealing in illicit activities, they each had a moral sense that their particular outlawed product was more just than another.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“He would soon be the first person in history to start an underground drug Web site on the Internet and the first person in history to see it go bankrupt because he had written so much shitty code.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” A verb. Twitter.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“While Ross had saved up for the perfect ring with which to propose, when he romantically asked his girlfriend for her hand in marriage (Say yes, please say yes), she instead said she had to tell Ross something (Well, this doesn’t sound good). At which point she admitted that during the past year or so she had cheated on him with several different men. (Several? As in more than one? Yes. Several.) To make matters worse, one of them was one of Ross’s best friends.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web

“Fred wasn't convinced, telling Charlie that such a service would never work and that other companies that had tried to make Twitter-like products had all failed.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Of course, Ev didn’t have a chance to assuage anyone’s fears. As far as he knew, everything was just fine at Twitter. He held his weekly meetings with Campbell, receiving his boisterous pep talk. “You’re doing a fucking great job!” Campbell would bellow. At board meetings Campbell would appear to listen to Ev’s presentations on the state of the company. After Ev’s sermons were done, the coach would clap loudly and hug his protégé, proclaiming again to everyone in the room that Ev was “doing a fucking great job!” and asking them to clap (none of this was a usual occurrence in a corporate board meeting). Then, after Ev left the room, proud that his mentor thought he was doing such a great job, Campbell would shout at the group: “You gotta get rid of this fucking guy! He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing!”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“they instead peered longingly at their phones, staring patiently while they waited for an update, hoping to find some snippet of information more important than real life.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“This is one of those rare government buildings in which someone who uses a calculator for a living can wield more power than a person who carries a gun.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

“Jack and Ev looked at each other for a moment in the boardroom. At that moment neither realized that they were both fundamental to what Twitter had become. The perfect equilibrium of two different ways of looking at the world: the need to talk about yourself, compared with the need to let people talk about what was happening around them. One could never have existed without the other. That balance, or battle, had created Twitter. A tool that could be used by corporate titans and teens, by celebrities and nobodies, by government officials and revolutionaries. A place where people with fundamentally different views of the world, like Jack and Ev, could converse.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“2009 rolled into view, Jack set off in search of what to do next. Now that the possibility of working at Facebook had been put on hold”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Ev had known all along that it had never been about the money. A billionaire still throws up into a garbage can. It was about making a dent in the universe.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Ev and Jack had fundamentally different views of what Twitter was and how it should be used. Jack had always seen Twitter as a status updater, a way to say where he was and what he was doing. A place to display yourself, your ego. Ev, who was shy and had been shaped by his days building Blogger, saw it as a way to share where other people were and what other people were doing.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“What do you think your valuation is right now?" Mark asked as they both sat uncomfortably across from and below him, peering up at a boy who could, hypothetically speaking, quite happily buy them or murder them, all with the same exact expression on his face.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

“Let the market decide; not the government.” “Let the people determine who should win; not the politicians.” “We’re changing the world and making it a better place.”
― Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web

“Hashtags are for nerds,” Biz replied. Ev added that they were “too harsh and no one is ever going to understand them.”
― Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal