Employees search for answers as Musk takeover becomes reality
In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a corporate summit called #Oneteam. During the event, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time, revealed he had invited a surprise guest. Then, with a wave and a smile, Elon Musk appeared on giant screens above the stage. The crowd cheered, clapped and pumped fists. “We love you,” one employee shouted.
Inside Twitter today, surprise announcements about Musk land differently. Employees said they have largely stopped celebrating the richest man in the world since he declared his intent earlier this month to buy Twitter, scrap its content moderation policies and transform the publicly traded company into a private one.
On Monday, Twitter announced it had accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for about $44 billion.
As the takeover fight played out over the past two weeks, Twitter employees said they were frustrated that they had heard little from management about what it meant for them, even as Twitter closed in on a deal with Musk on Monday morning. They asked their CEO, Parag Agrawal. They asked Musk himself in questions sent on Twitter. Some even went to Charles Schwab, the financial firm that manages their stock options, for clarity about the impact a sale of the company would have on them.
But they were not getting many answers before
Musk’s bid succeeded, said 11 Twitter employees who asked to not be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, even as it became clear that they could soon find themselves reporting to Musk. On Monday afternoon, Agrawal told employees he would finally speak with them at a meeting later that day. “I know this is a significant change and you’re likely processing what this means for you and Twitter’s future,” he wrote in an email to employees.
This kind of silence that hovered over the week of negotiations is routine in takeover fights. As the board of directors confers with bankers, lawyers and expensive public relations firms, employees are often kept in the dark.
However, for employees at Twitter, a company that has billed itself as the world’s town square, finding out what is happening to their company primarily through Twitter, the service they built, has been particularly embittering.
After years of leadership squabbles, demands for change from activist investors and the boundarytesting tweets of former President Donald Trump, Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees are accustomed to turmoil. But some of them say the takeover bid by the mercurial billionaire is hitting them in ways other company crises have not.
Employees said they worried that Musk would undo the years of work they have put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform, upend their stock compensation in the process of taking the company private, and disrupt Twitter’s culture with his unpredictable management style and abrupt proclamations.
But Musk also has fans among Twitter’s rank-andfile, and some employees have welcomed his bid. In an internal Slack message seen by The New York Times that asked if employees were excited about Musk, about 10 people responded with a “Yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
If Twitter is worth buying, much of its value is in the employees who build and manage the service, said David Larcker, a professor of accounting and corporate governance at Stanford University.
“The wild card is, what if it becomes a very different company than they thought they were working for? It’s an uncomfortable working relationship,” he said.
Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company must scrap nearly all of its moderation policies, which ban content like violent threats, harassment and spam. It must provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must become a private company.
Twitter has been expanding its content moderation policies since 2008, when its 25th employee was hired specifically to combat abuse on its platform. The teams overseeing moderation and safety have grown to hundreds of employees.
Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s effort to encourage healthy conversation — even if they do not directly work on content moderation — and have pressed executives to crack down further on hate speech and misinformation, six employees said. They see Musk’s proposal to revert to Twitter’s early, lax approach as a rebuke of their work.
But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up.
In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace review app, 44% said they were neutral on Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Musk, while 27% said they hated him.
Although executives and employees at Twitter have agreed with Musk about changes to its algorithm, that work is in its earliest stages and could take years to complete. That could test something Musk is not particularly known for — patience.
One of the top concerns among Twitter workers is whether they will take a financial hit from Musk’s acquisition. Many Twitter employees make 50% or more of their total compensation from Twitter stock. Employees said they feared missing out on the longterm value of their stock at Musk’s price of $54.20 per share.
In an attempt to quell financial worries, Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, told employees that any potential buyer would likely be required to keep employee equity “as is” or provide equivalent compensation, like a cash award.