Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton is an American technology journalist and author who spent years as a reporter and columnist at The New York Times covering Silicon Valley.

Nick Bilton was a technology reporter and columnist at The New York Times for nearly a decade before moving to Vanity Fair, where he covers Silicon Valley and the technology industry. He has broken significant stories about major technology companies and their founders, combining access journalism with a flair for narrative non-fiction.

Hatching Twitter (2013) is his most significant book: a rigorously reported account of how Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, and how the four founders subsequently fought for control of what they had created. Bilton had exceptional access — interviewing all four founders — and the resulting narrative is one of the best Silicon Valley origin stories in print.

The book’s most important contribution was complicating the mythology around Jack Dorsey’s founding role, demonstrating with documentary evidence that the story Dorsey had told about being Twitter’s visionary creator was substantially constructed after the fact, at the expense of Noah Glass. The account of how founding narratives are constructed in Silicon Valley has broader implications beyond the Twitter story itself.