Summary, Analysis, and Review of Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin

PLEASE NOTE: This is a key takeaways and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.

Start Publishing Notes’ Summary, Analysis, and Review of Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road includes a summary of the book, review, analysis & key takeaways, and detailed “About the Author” section.

PREVIEW: American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton tells the story of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of an illegal website that helped people buy and sell illicit goods anonymously. The author traces how Ross transformed his nascent idea for an “eBay for drugs” on the Dark Web into a multimillion dollar business, as well as the team of crafty feds who brought him down—and ultimately put him behind bars for life.
Ross was a 24-year-old graduate student at Penn State when he met his girlfriend, Julia. He was politically active on campus to the point where his libertarianism distracted him from his studies, which led to a dismissal from his PhD program in 2010. Julia quit school and followed him to Austin, Texas, where his family lived. After a handful of failed business ventures, Ross began working long hours to develop an idea he’d been toying with for some time: an online marketplace where people could buy and sell anything from drugs to guns without fearing for their safety or privacy. The recent invention of Bitcoin had made his pipe dream realistic, and he was so excited that he worked long hours teaching himself the code he needed to build the site. By 2011, it was ready. Using an alias, Ross left a few messages advertising its existence on drug-related forums. That’s all it took to launch his website, the Silk Road.