Let’s start with this tweet from Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at Twitter. It’s said Crawford is so loyal to the company she often sleeps in her office rather than go home.
The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. ?
— Esther Crawford ? (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
Musk fired her today. She must have posted this right after being fired. I take it she’s not ready to go through the stages of grief yet. More from TechCrunch:
Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss.
The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they had been cut off from using Slack. While it later came out that Twitter hadn’t paid its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The Platformer reported that someone at Twitter manually shut off access. Many employees worried that this was the first sign of layoffs to come, and while correlation does not equal causation, an entire company being cut off from their main mode of communication as layoffs started dropping like bombs caused confusion and panic all around.
At this point, why would any competent person not absolutely desperate for a job go to work for Elon Musk? Alex Kirshner writes at Slate:
Crawford was the head of Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk has hyped as a key business plank but that has not attracted subscribers in large numbers. She had been as public as anyone in her embrace of Musk’s grindset cultural demands. When people pointed out that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for a leader to promote sleeping at the office, she stood up for it in an extensive thread. Musk, who brags about not sleeping much, probably loved it. Not four months later, Crawford’s payoff for going extremely hardcore was that Musk fired her.
They may well all have been Esther Crawfords. Those latest 200 Twitter layoffs had all remained at the company, or taken jobs there, after Musk made his demands of Twitter and its workplace culture quite clear. All of these people were prepared to stick around long after Musk had slashed everything but his expectations for their performance. These were the workers who were all in. There are many fair reasons for a person to stay in a demanding job with an unsatisfiable boss—money, health insurance, a fear of unemployment, and immigration status all come to mind—but Musk didn’t even give them the choice for long.
It will probably happen again, to more employees, at all of Musk’s companies. (Twitter is not the first Musk firm, or even the most troubling, to have staff sleeping on the floor.) The CEO glorifies the grind in which someone gives nearly their entire self over to their work. But that commitment isn’t a two-way street. …
Now that the world knows this, good luck hiring the best and brightest, dude.
A few days ago Musk fired a top engineer because views of his Tweets had gone down:
Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.
A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk. To back up the engineer, Twitter employees provided internal data that corresponded with a Google Trends chart, Platformer reported.
You know the rest. Musk threw a fit and fired the engineer for telling him the truth. And, sure enough, a few days after that the Verge reported Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s tweets now.
The latest, coming out after Scott Adams’s declaration that Black people are a “hate group” that White people should stay away from —
“The media is racist,” was Musk’s response to the widespread decision to terminate the Dilbert strip. “For a very long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites and Asians.”
He went on to compare US media with elite educational institutions in America where he claimed the “same thing happened”.
It was also reported that Musk deleted a tweet in which he responded to a comment from Adams about his comic strip being dropped, saying, “What exactly are they complaining about?”
Musk is said to have Asperger’s, which partly explains why he is so tone deaf. But that doesn’t explain why he’s such a jerk.
In other news, I see that Tesla stock value has surged recently, making Musk the richest person in the world again. It’s not clear to me why that happened. Today we learned that some of Tesla shareholders are suing Tesla for “overstating the effectiveness and safety of their electric vehicles’ Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies,” it says here. So let’s see what that does to the stock price.