Three months, thousands of layoffs, one ego
In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder, and was offered a seat on the board. Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch, when it comes to growing the companies he’s helped lead,” he wrote in Slack.
Rumors were swirling that Musk planned to cut 75 percent of the company. People were audibly sobbing in the bathrooms. Like Trump, Musk knew how to use Twitter to make himself the center of the conversation. His incessant, irreverent tweeting violated every norm of corporate America, endearing his fans, pissing off his haters, and making him the second-most-followed active account on the site. “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne,” he tweeted one evening in late 2021. “It gives me solace.”
In three months, Musk has also largely destroyed the equity value of Twitter and much of his personal wealth. He has indicated that the company could declare bankruptcy, and the distraction of running it has caused Tesla stock to crater, costing him $200 billion. Unlike some of her colleagues, Alicia wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video.
The next day, Alicia and her colleagues gathered in the cafeteria of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for a long-planned Halloween party. The room was decorated with miniature pumpkins and fake spiderwebs. Employees tried to get in the holiday spirit, but rumors were swirling that Musk planned to cut 75 percent of the company. People were audibly sobbing in the bathrooms.
Employees braced for layoffs, but no word came from Musk. People hunted for information on their unofficial Slacks, Discords, and Signal chats while glued to Musk’s Twitter feed for news like everyone else. “Hey all don’t forget to complete your q3 goals!” one employee wrote darkly on Slack. “Writes, ‘stay employed,’ ” responded a colleague.
Alicia was scheduled to meet with Musk around 11 a.m. She felt bad about the anxiety coursing through the office, even if she was sanguine about the process. As a back-end engineer, she was used to being woken up in the middle of the night because something on the platform was breaking — a crisis that could impact millions of Twitter users. It took more than a code review to faze her.
Amir Shevat, who managed Twitter’s developer platform and had led large teams at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, was perplexed. Every company did stack ranking differently. Should they sort workers by seniority? Impact? Revenue generated? No one had an answer. “They said, ‘We don’t know. Elon wants a stack rank,’ ” Shevat says.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she said. Twitter employees were soon either sitting around waiting to be fired or placed on Musk projects, pulling all-nighters at the office and trying to meet arbitrary deadlines, even as product plans changed by the day . If they didn’t meet their deadlines, they were told, they’d be fired — a fate that, to some, looked increasingly desirable.
By morning, 50 percent of the workforce had lost their jobs, well over 3,000 people. “The alternation between relief about being done, sadness about [waves at gaps and fires where there was cool people / hope], anxiety that Musk might fuck with severance, and exhaustion at thought of interviewing is a bit much,” wrote the same former employee, “but veering towards relief.”
It worked: Crawford was tasked with relaunching Twitter’s subscription product, Twitter Blue. The feature would allow users to pay $8 to get verified and, Musk hoped, wean the company off its dependency on advertisers. The two people who once led the subscription effort were ousted, making Crawford one of the company’s most prominent product leaders.
Twitter’s trust and safety team compiled a seven-page document outlining the dangers associated with paid verification. What would stop people from impersonating politicians or brands? They ranked the risk a “P0,” the highest possible. But Musk and his team refused to take any recommendations that would delay the launch.
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