Oprah Winfrey now has nearly 22 million Twitter followers, but her first tweet was something of a catastrophe, a new book reveals.
Nick Bilton’s “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal,” details the near-disaster when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams went on the media queen’s show to demonstrate how to use it.
“To ensure she couldn’t mess up her first tweet, the staff had set up a laptop with colored stickers,” it reads. “It was paint by numbers for the clumsy computer user.” Oprah was “instructed to ‘press the button on the keyboard with a yellow sticker’ . . . but instead pressed the caps-lock button . . . then, rather than hit ‘send’ on Twitter, she accidentally pressed the key with the yellow tape on it. This reset the screen and erased her first tweet.”
They cut to a commercial and Williams “pushed Oprah aside and grabbed the keyboard.” The book also details a booze-soaked meeting where Al Gore offered Williams and Biz Stone “whiskey, beer, wine, champagne? Shots?!” to persuade them to sell the company to use in conjunction with Current TV, which he explained he had wrangled “from a French conglomerate by pulling lots of strings and calling in favors.”
After being told they weren’t selling, “Gore wasn’t giving up. He emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of Patrón tequila and a handful of shot glasses. ‘Tell me this is the good stuff,’ he said with loud laughter.” The book says others who tried to buy Twitter included Mark Zuckerberg, Ashton Kutcher and P. Diddy.