By the morning of November 1, Kaiden felt like his work was done. He had verified that Twitter’s employees were, in fact, real and Musk’s fears of ghosts were delusions. Not one to use Slack for small talk, he was businesslike in his announcement: “Payroll is working on processing the vest now,” he wrote in the workplace chat that morning. The message garnered dozens of thumbs-up and prayer hands emoji responses.
Musk was less thrilled. The payout would cost him $200 million as he enriched a group of workers he believed were lazy and undeserving. And while he had authorized Kaiden to conduct the audit, his team had not given the chief accounting officer the authority to make the announcement. The next day, the goons locked the accountant out of his laptop and he was escorted out of the San Francisco office. He walked out a hero.
On November 1, Spiro gave McSweeney new marching orders. Instead of cutting her team by 25 percent, she needed to find a way to dismiss 50 percent, he said. She had been in direct contact with Spiro throughout the weekend as they traded layoff lists, and was shocked at the sudden change.
Just days earlier, Spiro had been reassuring her and promising to help along the way, but she was being handed off to Sam Teller, Musk’s former chief of staff who somehow had also been drafted into this mess. Teller asked for a crash course on Twitter’s public policy operations, forcing McSweeney to repeat what she’d told Spiro on Friday. McSweeney ran through her spiel again.
McSweeney thought the magnitude of the layoffs made no sense, and she was worried about taking instructions from people like Spiro and Teller, who had no formal roles at Twitter. Their orders seemed likely to get her into trouble, particularly as she prepared to lay off employees in Europe, many of whom were protected by stricter labor laws than their colleagues in the United States and entitled to extended notice of a mass layoff. She wrote to the company’s human resources and legal teams, notifying them of her concerns. But no one seemed willing to contravene Musk.
>>> Meanwhile, Musk’s trip to New York had done little to mollify advertisers. Interpublic Group, or IPG, a large advertising company whose agencies represent American Express, Coca-Cola, and Mattel, told its clients to temporarily pause spending on Twitter.
The news didn’t sit well with Musk. He began to think there were other forces at play. He crafted a narrative—much like the ones he advanced in the early days of Tesla when he suggested that oil companies, short sellers, and news outlets colluded to bring about its failure—that activist groups were pressuring advertisers to stop spending. He became convinced these groups, including Media Matters for America, a left-wing media watchdog group, and the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish advocacy group, were conspiring against him, funded by moneyed interests to prevent him from building the free speech platform for the masses.
These groups had voiced their fears to advertisers. “We are concerned that Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter may accelerate what ADL has seen repeatedly: the pushing out of marginalized communities from social media,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the ADL, said in a statement on the day Musk completed his acquisition. But this wasn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. Activist groups had held social media companies accountable for years with their studies of the platforms, and Musk’s actions simply attracted their further scrutiny. Musk would later push to ban posts on his site that called for ad boycotts, arguing that they amounted to blackmail. The rule never went into place.
After the IPG decision, Maheu knew Twitter wouldn’t be able to stop the dominos from falling. But it wouldn’t be his problem for long. Gracias hadn’t taken his advice on the layoffs kindly and Musk clearly disliked him after his pushback on the Trump tweet. So when the call came that he’d be escorted out of the New York building by Twitter’s security staff, he was ready. He left his laptop and carried nothing as he walked by the desks of the men and women he led across Twitter’s sales teams. Maheu was the first person fired on the East Coast.
Berland would follow close behind. Sitting on a different floor from the sales staff, she was unaware what had happened to the sales exec. But that day, her communications with Musk and his goons had become sparse. She had vouched for Maheu to Musk, and his attempt to stop the billionaire from tweeting would not reflect well on her.
That afternoon, her phone rang with a call from Pacini. Berland stepped into a private booth. Pacini had been crying.
“I hate to do this, but I have to tell you,” Pacini said, trailing off. “You’re no longer employed at Twitter.”
Berland waited a beat to collect her thoughts. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but this wasn’t the way she had planned to go out. It was so cold.
“What’s the context?” she asked.
“I don’t have any,” Pacini replied. “There will be a security guard by soon to escort you out.”
The guard was already at the door of the booth. Berland left her computer and began her walk.
Unlike Maheu’s walk, there were fewer people to see Berland go. The chief marketing officer waved goodbye to her former assistant, before taking an elevator down. After a short ride, she exited through a back entrance and was whisked into a car that drove into the drab Manhattan cold. As word of her abrupt firing spread through the office, Berland tweeted a simple goodbye: a single blue heart emoji.
>>> Twitter product managers, designers, and engineers knew they had days, if not hours, to prove their worth. Outside of Twitter Blue, Musk didn’t appear to have a clear road map of products for employees to work on. Continuing the projects chosen by old management seemed risky—Musk had already made it clear he didn’t respect Agrawal’s vision.
Ideas were thrown out from everywhere, and projects were started and stopped as Musk’s lieutenants jockeyed for position, all believing they had brilliant ideas to transform Twitter. With Musk tied up sorting out operations and layoffs, some of the goons portrayed themselves as decision-makers and issued product directives.
Calacanis asserted himself. He sat in on meetings with product and policy staffers, later tweeting out his impressions and findings as if he were speaking for the wider company. His posts hinted that he was taking suggestions from his Twitter followers and relaying them to the top. But Musk wouldn’t tolerate anyone else running product. When he saw Calacanis’s tweets, Musk dispatched someone to the war room to tell his friend to stop acting like he was calling the shots.
“To be clear, Elon is the product manager and CEO,” Calacanis later tweeted, following the reprimand.
Desperate to save their jobs, workers started throwing mud at the walls. One team was spun up to work on paid direct messaging, a feature that would allow regular people to send private notes to so-called Very Important Tweeters. Mock-ups presented to Musk’s entourage showed a user paying a few dollars to message the musician Post Malone, with Twitter taking a cut of the proceeds.
Another pet project for Musk was encrypting direct messages, which would prevent anyone except the sender and receiver from reading them. For years, the company had debated whether to encrypt the messages, sealing them off completely so that even Twitter itself couldn’t access them or share them with law enforcement. Gadde wanted to offer more privacy to users but feared that encrypted messages would facilitate harassment and the exchange of illicit material. Engineers scrambled to kick-start the effort, code-named Night Parrot.
One night that week, a member of Musk’s team called one of Twitter’s cybersecurity engineers, who had been tapped to aid the transition. Could he come back to meet with the boss? The security expert sighed—he had just settled in after a long day at the office and taken a shower. He got dressed again, making his way back to work through San Francisco’s empty streets.
Musk held court in his conference room, while two bodyguards with Texan accents loitered in the kitchen nearby. Around midnight, he finally beckoned the engineer in. Musk was cordial, asking about the worker’s background and what he’d done at Twitter over the years, but the meeting felt like a job interview. Musk was deciding whether he could trust the engineer.
Then Musk’s paranoia emerged. “Did Twitter read my DMs?” he asked. He appeared convinced that the former executives had been snooping on him during the lawsuit.
The engineer tried to answer as best he could. The company made it extraordinarily difficult for employees to access a user’s direct messages, but some workers were allowed to do it when responding to reports of abuse or subpoenas. As far as he knew, no one had read Musk’s messages—but it wasn’t impossible.
Musk kept digging, certain the old regime had spied on him. Who could have had access? And how could he find out? The engineer delicately tried to steer the conversation back to encryption, saying Musk’s worries were a good example of why Twitter should encrypt messages. The pit in his stomach widened, and he felt that whatever he said would be the difference between being promoted or fired. Finally, Musk moved on.
In other meetings, Musk toyed with the idea of adding paywalled videos—like the adult content site OnlyFans—allowing users to charge for premium content. Twitter would take a cut of those proceeds, though staffers immediately began expressing concerns about the potential for pornography and pirated films, which would degrade advertiser trust in the platform. Paywalled videos and the paid message features never launched, while encrypted direct messages were unveiled months later in a very limited capacity.
Employees scrambled to latch on to Musk’s pet projects, messaging each other privately to try to join Night Parrot or find their way into Crawford’s shadow project, which wasn’t much of a secret as Musk and Calacanis tweeted about their idea of charging for verification badges. With Musk’s stamp of approval, the Twitter Blue relaunch felt like the surest way to survive the coming layoffs.
Crawford had circulated a spreadsheet of the seventy employees around the globe who were working on paid verification. It became known as a de facto “safe list” and some members of her team began to add their friends and colleagues with the hope of throwing them a lifeline. The list started to flood with the names of people who were dependent on Twitter’s healthcare benefits for themselves or their family members, or relied on their job to maintain their immigration status. Eventually, one manager put the kibosh on the effort and locked the document from further additions.
“The team needs to be light,” the manager messaged the offenders.
Even Crawford, who had a direct line to Musk, wasn’t immune from the rumors. After Maheu’s and Berland’s firings in New York, she became convinced that the executive terminations had also swept up her boss, Tony Haile.
As paranoia swirled about Haile’s supposed firing, in which he was said to have been marched out by the guards, Crawford was gutted.
“Why would they do that?” she said to some of her Blue employees. “It’s so unnecessary. Like, I’m a go-getter but I have limits. We’re here to ship this thing and we’re going to get this out. But if we quit, it will be on our own terms.”
Haile, however, had not been terminated.
“Hey I’m still here,” he wrote in a message in Slack to his team later that day. “There are rumors of me having been fired but as far as I know I still work here.” (Haile eventually did quit.)
Unwilling to wait for the axe to fall before taking action, workers tried to connect with each other off Twitter-controlled platforms, which they knew were monitored by Musk’s team. They added one another on LinkedIn, created external Slack groups, and traded phone numbers to create support networks in case they all lost access to their email accounts. They also began circulating “A Layoff Guide,” which outlined workers’ rights in the U.S. and gave tips on how to deal with requests from new management and workplace surveillance. Some even tweeted at Musk, asking him to lay them off in order to spare colleagues on work visas.
The human resources employees responsible for pulling off the massive cuts felt just as confused. It seemed to them that Sacks, Calacanis, Davis, and the other Musk lieutenants weighing in on the layoffs were trying to outdo each other, each hoping to emerge as the most ruthless. The lists of employees who would be dismissed kept expanding to keep up with their demands.
Birchall emerged as a lone voice of reason among Musk’s advisers. The HR teams discovered they could go to him to argue for a team or an employee to stay, and he would listen to the justification. The rest of Musk’s people seemed to delight in laying waste to Twitter.
Birchall, Spiro, and Teller tried to counsel their new Twitter counterparts about how to speak to Musk. Never pretend to know the answer when you don’t, they said. They also recommended against ever having open-ended conversations with Musk. He should be presented with options, preferably no more than two or three, and be allowed to choose from them. The Twitter employees should then make their recommendation from among the options so Musk could assess their judgment.
Pacini took their recommendations to heart. She and the rest of the Twitter employees assigned to the layoff drew up options for Musk. Brian Bjelde, a human resources vice president Musk brought over from SpaceX, weighed in, explaining how the rocket company had handled severance in the past so that the options they eventually put in front of Musk would have the benefit of having been vouched for by someone who had spent twenty years working for the billionaire.
One was a bare-bones version that covered what Musk was legally obligated to pay, and the other was slightly more generous. The severance was uninteresting to Musk. He told Pacini to let Bjelde pick what he thought was best. Musk also remained noncommittal about the total number of employees to eliminate, leaving the decision-making to his inner circle.
As employees went searching for morsels of information about the layoff, they found that Musk’s transition team hadn’t been careful to keep their plans a secret. On Wednesday, workers discovered an open Slack channel called #tundra-ec-comp, in which human resources employees were talking openly about severance and cuts. The workers took screenshots and quickly circulated them in private chats.
“The severance calculations are updated based on the master list as of 12:30pm today,” one HR rep wrote, noting that the list was “pretty much final.”
The employees fixated on her last message. “The count on my sheet is 3738,” she wrote.
The figure represented just about half of Twitter’s 7,500 full-time employees, the most solid confirmation that many people were about to lose their jobs. The workers kept digging. That afternoon, one realized that the online calendars for some of the transition team were still public and found an invite on Sacks’s schedule for Project Tundra, a discussion for the so-called “reduction in force.” Also invited to the meeting were Gracias, Spiro, Birchall, and Teller. After workers distributed screenshots of Sacks’s calendar among themselves, employee calendars were suddenly made private.
Later that day, an engineer in the San Francisco office was just pacing the hallways when he came across one of the hired hands brought in from Tesla, who seemed engrossed in a phone conversation. The Tesla worker didn’t seem to notice the Twitter employee approach as he hissed into his device.
“Cut off their access at 5 p.m. None of them are to be trusted.”