Remember that “Fork In The Road/Twitter 2.0” invite Elon sent to all remaining Twitter employees where you could opt into working like a dog OR be fired?
Looks like 85% of Twitter’s remaining employees chose option B.
Welp… even employees who have resigned… still have access to twitter cuz the managers who terminate employees and remove their access… also resigned. 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/508naLLyBo
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) November 18, 2022
Some did it in style, in unison with team members. Some just walked out, but if these reports are True, there aren’t enough people left working at Twitter to run Twitter anymore.
It’s been a ride pic.twitter.com/0VDf5hn2UA
— Matt Miller (@brainiaq2000) November 17, 2022
And just like that, after 12 years, I have left Twitter. I have nothing but love for all my fellow tweeps, past and present. A thousand faces and a thousand scenes are flashing through my mind right now – I love you Twitter and I’ll forever bleed blue 🫡💙
— Satanjeev Banerjee (@satanjeev) November 17, 2022
Hundreds of Twitter’s remaining employees have resigned ahead of Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company, according to internal Slack messages seen by The Verge and employee tweets.
https://crier.co/news/you-have-to-read-elon-musks-fork-in-the-road-email-to-all-twitter-staff/
The Verge: The fresh purge of Twitter’s ranks comes after Musk recently fired dozens of employees who criticized or mocked him in tweets and internal messages. Musk then set a deadline of 5PM ET on Thursday for all employees to respond “yes” on a Google form if they want to stay for what he is calling “Twitter 2.0;” otherwise, today would be their final day of work, and they would receive a severance package. After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum.
“I’m not pressing the button,” one departing employee posted in Slack. “My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
“My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services. The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.
Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.
In a tweet Thursday evening, Musk said: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”
I talked to a few Vencap guys in the tech sector about Elon this morning. They both said the same thing: Elon’s bored with rockets, electric cars, robots, and neural links. He can afford to throw away $44-$100 Billion on pure hubris, ego, and vanity and that’s exactly what he’s doing. Every change he wants to bring to Twitter has been tried and dusted by dev teams over the years, but he doesn’t care. Treating his employees like they are worthless is a terrible business strategy, always. Not listening to those engineers and managers whose job at Twitter was to fail for a living is going to be Elon’s undoing and that’s a God Complex thing that kills every investor and entrepreneur with no guardrails or discipline.
After employees were locked out at 5 pm. This appeared on the side of Twitter’s HQ in San Fran:
Twitter HQ right now. pic.twitter.com/kAdgxw8nFi
— Dean Blundell🇨🇦 (@ItsDeanBlundell) November 18, 2022
Elon is SUPER worried. He lies. Most of his tweets are lies or PR for himself and other projects and are completely irrelevant to the business of Twitter. His RTs of people who lick his nuts for attention or “Elon Musk University” account dedicated to his daily activities. It reminds me of those Crypto bros and bitcoin dudes going on social media tours of bitcoin conferences at wineries while FTX DROVE their coins into the toilet.
Twitter Closed All Their Offices, Revoked All Employee Badge Access. Is This The End Of Twitter? https://t.co/o8d3bEi4ih
— Dean Blundell🇨🇦 (@ItsDeanBlundell) November 18, 2022
Usage doesn’t translate to revenue. Clients A) don’t want to be associated with a man or a brand who treats his employees like shit and B) want the CEO of Twitter posting pictures of Nazis while making Ligma Johnson Blowjob jokes.
I, for one, appreciate the Ligma Johnson stuff but Audi and Johnson & Johnson? Not so much. And regardless of Elon’s South African, Emerald Mine, Colonial upbringing, businesses aren’t huge fans of a picture of nazis carrying bird cages sitting above their car ad.
I listened to Kara Swisher’s podcast this week. She’s known Elon for 20 years and watched Twitter’s start-up as “ODEO.”
Her assessment was as simple as the assessment of Elon by my venture capital friends. Elon has gone Hollywood. Revolutionizing space travel is old news., Now he wants to be the center of attention because he thinks the adulation from incels means he’s special. More special than anyone else, and burning $44 billion in a vanity project is the ultimate Fcuk You to his dad and anyone else who said: “Elon is a fraud.”
In Elon’s mind, burning down Twitter and the people in it is like buying your neighbor’s house and knocking it to the ground because you hate your neighbor.
Twitter working and being profitable is secondary when you wipe your ass with billions and think you’re a God.
LOL.
DB
Dean Blundell is a Canadian radio personality. Best known as a longtime morning host on CFNY-FM (The Edge) in Toronto, Ontario. In 2015 he was named the new morning host on sports radio station CJCL (Sportsnet 590 The Fan). Dean started his career in radio in 2001 and for nearly 20 years been entertaining the radio audience. Dean’s newest venture is the launch of his site and podcast which is gaining tremendous momentum across North America.
