Final words: a eulogy for “The Tweet Hereafter”

What I learned from one of my strangest digital experiments

Michael McWatters
The Startup
Published in
7 min readJun 24, 2019

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Birth

March 1, 2012

At 11:25 pm, Andrew Breitbart, founder of the arch-conservative Breitbart News, lobbed a somewhat nasty tweet at a perceived enemy. A short while later, he went for a walk in his Brentwood neighborhood, dog in tow, whereupon he collapsed to the ground. At 12:19 am, less than an hour after hitting Send on his final tweet, he was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center. Cause of death: heart attack. Breitbart was 43.

Breitbart, 18 days before his death . WikiMedia

Here for all eternity is his final tweet, his last public utterance, spelling errors and all:

After reading of his passing, I asked Twitter a question:

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Michael McWatters
The Startup

VP, Product Design at Max | HBO Max. Formerly TED. Better after a nap.