Twitter employees try to understand the new life under Musk

In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a corporate meeting called #OneDream. During the event, Jack Dorsey, then the company’s chief executive, revealed that he had a surprise guest. Then, with a wave and a smile, Elon Musk appeared on a screen above the stage. The audience cheered, applauded and raised their fists. “We love you,” shouted one of the Twitter workers.

Within the company today, Musk-related surprises have a different effect. Employees say they have largely stopped cheering the richest man on the planet since he declared his intention earlier this month to take control of Twitter, revoke its moderation rules and take the company private. On Monday (25), Twitter announced that it had accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the company for about $44 billion.

As the fight for controlling interest unfolded over the past two weeks, Twitter employees said they were frustrated that they had heard little from managers about what the transaction would mean for them, even as the final deal with Musk appeared to be looming. on Monday morning.

They asked Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief executive. They asked Musk directly, via Twitter. And some even reached out to broker Charles Schwab, who manages the company’s employees’ stock options, for clarification on the impact a Twitter sale would have on them.

But they didn’t get many responses before Musk’s offer was approved, said 11 Twitter employees, who spoke on the condition that their names not be mentioned because they are not authorized to speak publicly, although it was becoming increasingly clear that they would soon report to Musk.

On Monday afternoon, Agrawal and Twitter chairman Bret Taylor finally held a meeting with employees to discuss the transaction. Compensation would remain more or less the same under Musk, Agrawal said, but he offered no similar assurances about the company’s norms and culture.

“Our standards have always been in constant evolution,” Agrawal said in response to an employee’s question about whether former President Donald Trump would be allowed to use the platform again. “When the transaction is completed, we don’t know what direction the company will take.”

The silence that hung over the negotiations routinely happens in controlling shareholder disputes, Taylor told employees. As the board grapples with financiers, lawyers and expensive public relations consultants, workers are often left in the dark. But for the employees of Twitter, a company that likes to describe itself as the place where the world is, finding out what’s going on inside the company primarily through tweets, on the service they’ve built, was an especially unpleasant experience.

After years of leadership wrangling, calls for change from activist investors and Trump’s tweets, which always defied the limits of usage rules, Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees are used to the turmoil. But some say the moody billionaire’s takeover is affecting them in ways other crises at the company haven’t.

Employees expressed concern that Musk would undo the years of work they’ve done to clean up the platform’s most toxic quadrants, that he’ll undermine the share of his compensation by taking the company private, and that he’ll disrupt the Twitter culture, with its unpredictable management style and abrupt pronouncements.

But Musk also has his fans among ordinary Twitter employees, and some of them have welcomed his proposal. In an internal Slack message seen by The New York Times that asked if employees were excited about Musk, about 10% of people responded with a “yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

If Twitter is worth acquiring, much of the company’s value lies in the employees who built and run the service, said David Larcker, a professor of accounting and corporate governance at Stanford University. “The question is, what if the company turns out to be very different from the one these people thought they were working for? It’s an uncomfortable working relationship,” he said.

Musk made some of his intentions clear in documents he sent to regulatory authorities, tweets and public statements. The company is expected to drop most of its moderation policies, which prohibit content like violent threats, harassment, and spam. It should provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to promote tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must close its capital.

Twitter has been expanding its content moderation rules since 2008, when the company’s 25th employee was hired specifically to combat any abuse of the platform. The teams that oversee content moderation and security now span hundreds of workers.

Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s efforts to encourage healthy dialogue — even if they don’t work directly with content moderation — and have pressured executives to further clamp down on hostile rhetoric and misinformation, six of the employees said. They see Musk’s proposal to return to Twitter’s earlier, looser approach as a rejection of his work.

But other employees argued in internal messages seen by The New York Times that their co-workers had moved too far to the left of the political spectrum, and that this had made company workers who support Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up. In a survey conducted by Blind, a workplace review app that conducts anonymous surveys, and involving nearly 200 Twitter employees, 44% of them said they were neutral on Musk. Another 27% said they loved him, the same proportion as those who declared they hated him.

While Twitter executives and employees have agreed with Musk on the changes to Twitter’s algorithm, that work is just beginning and could take years to complete. Which may be a test of a trait Musk isn’t known for: patience.

One of the biggest concerns among Twitter workers is whether they will take a financial hit from Musk’s takeover. Many of the company’s workers receive 50% or more of their compensation in the form of company stock. Some of them said they were afraid of missing out on the long-term gains their stock could have, given Musk’s acquisition at $54.20 a share.

At the workers’ meeting on Monday, executives tried to reassure staff that Musk’s takeover would not harm workers. Agrawal told workers that his stock options could be converted into cash when the deal with Musk closes, which he estimates could take between three and six months. Employees would continue to receive the same benefit packages for one year after the transaction is finalized.

In an earlier attempt to assuage financial concerns, Sean Edgett, Twitter’s vice president of legal counsel, told employees that any potential buyer would likely have to keep workers’ stock “as is” or offer cash equivalent compensation.

Edgett, who made his comments before the deal with Musk was announced, stressed that workers should not take his advice as information about the deal being negotiated. “This is meant to provide some peace of mind and explain how these things typically work, and it doesn’t mean that we believe one outcome is more likely than another,” he wrote in a message to company employees seen by The New. York Times.

Twitter is on a hiring spree, and it spent $630 million in equity compensation in 2021, 33% more than the year before. The company predicted in its balance sheet published in February that it would spend between $900 million and $925 million in equity compensation this year.

But Musk’s campaign has also started to undermine Twitter’s efforts to hire more staff, according to internal documents detailing the company’s hiring efforts and seen by The New York Times. Potential hires expressed skepticism about Musk’s plans to transform Twitter and abandon its content moderation rules, the documents point out.

Employees also worry that he might move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, as he did with Tesla’s. And with the possibility that he might cancel Twitter’s flexible policy on returning to work in the offices, which had been one of the attractions for current employees and recruits. Musk, after all, fought with California authorities to keep his car factory open during the pandemic.

Agrawal tried to calm his workforce. In a question-and-answer session on Monday, he urged workers to “operate Twitter as we always have,” adding that “the way we run the company, the decisions we make and the positive changes we drive – that will depend on us and will be under our control”.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci