Twitter Workers Freak Out Over Elon Musk In Internal Messaging App

New York Post

Leaked internal communications by Twitter employees reveal woke employees are overtaken by despair and anger about Elon Musk’s month-long effort to acquire Twitter.

Musk announced he would purchase the company for $44 billion on Monday. The deal concludes a month-long saga that began with Musk first tweeting out polls and his thoughts about the decline of free speech on Twitter.

On the business communication platform Slack, some Twitter employees vented against the new owner, leaked messages reveal.

“Physically cringy watching Elon talk about free speech,” a site reliability engineer who identifies as a nonbinary transgender and plural person wrote.

“We’re all going through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone’s nerves are frazzled,” wrote a senior staff software engineer who called Musk an “a**hole,” and tried to console his colleagues. “We’re all spinning our wheels, and coming up with worst case scenarios (Trump returns! No more moderation!). The fact is that [Musk] has not talked about what he’s planning on doing in any detail outside of broad sweeping statements that could be easily seen as hyperbolic showboating.”

A senior staff video engineer announced he would be quitting, “Not the place to say it perhaps, but I will not work for this company after the takeover.”

Following the back-and-forth among multiple employees angry about the news, some warned that their communications on Slack could be searched. The employees then moved their conversations onto their personal devices using the encrypted chat application Signal.

Twitter’s leadership appeared to predict an internal backlash and possible sabotage when it locked down the ability of its employees to make changes to the platform through Friday.

Leading up to Monday’s deal, Twitter employees had already been venting for weeks on Slack about Musk and defending the platform’s moderation enforcement.

A reliability engineering manager said Musk’s views on free speech “is cover for ‘I want to not be held accountable for saying or amplifying harmful things.’”

Another engineer wrote that “self-reported censorship is sometimes just horrible people f—king around and then find[ing] out.” A senior content strategist responded, “and it doesn’t happen often enough.”

That senior content strategist, who worked as a left-wing political operative outside of Twitter, led many of the conversations that were heavily critical of Musk.

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