33 > The Snap
By the morning of Thursday, November 3, employees had all but confirmed their firings by snooping on internal calendars and message boards. But they’d still heard nothing from Musk. Instead of telling his new employees that they would be laid off, Musk was busy sharing the news with advertisers.
Musk hopped on a call with Twitter’s Influence Council, a group of more than one hundred advertisers and executives from corporations like General Motors, Mastercard, and Microsoft. The group held occasional meetings to give guidance to the company, and although they’d expected to gather at the beginning of 2023 for an all-expenses-paid getaway in Napa Valley’s wine country, Musk had canceled the event.
“We are doing a reduction in force at Twitter and that’s going to be sort of executed in the next few days,” Musk said to open the call. “And it just doesn’t seem right that if we did a big reduction in force, and then…now you’re at a boondoggle in Napa.”
Among those listening in were Linda Yaccarino, the head of global advertising at NBCUniversal, as well as Roth, one of the company’s remaining safety and policy executives, and Robin Wheeler, a sales executive who was attempting to keep Musk on task.
Wheeler had been abruptly elevated after the departures of Maheu and Personette and was facing a bit of an audition in front of her new boss. As marketing officers who collectively controlled billions of dollars in ad spending listened, Wheeler stroked Musk’s ego.
“We have the greatest, greatest product and engineering innovator of all time working at the helm of this company, and I’m so excited about what that means for our product road map,” Wheeler said. Later, she claimed Musk’s ownership had already caused Twitter to attract its highest-ever number of daily active users—like a homeowner watching her house burn down, marveling at how many neighbors were rubbernecking.
While the marketing leaders were deferential, they also peppered Musk with their concerns, asking about content moderation, product plans, and the billionaire’s late-night tweeting habit. He tried to address them all, promising the company would make no major content decisions until “at least a week” after the coming U.S. midterm election. He also focused on his newly co-opted idea of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” which Roth had introduced to him during their meeting the week prior.
As he listened to Musk’s pitch, Detavio Samuels felt skeptical. Samuels was the CEO of Revolt, a media company founded by Sean “Diddy” Combs that focused on Black audiences. He had read reports that usage of racial slurs had increased dramatically on Twitter since Musk’s takeover, as trolls were emboldened by the new ownership to spew hate. Black communities made essential contributions to Twitter, he said, and Musk’s approach to content moderation concerned him. He built upon Musk’s metaphor to make his point.
“As a Black man, I don’t want to walk down a neighborhood where people are whispering the N-word, whether I hear it or not. I don’t want to walk down a neighborhood where I hear one person whisper the N-word. Maybe nobody else heard it, but I did,” Samuels said. “As you continue down the path that you’re going, I really recommend that you have conversations with this specific community and that we make sure that whatever solutions are created are solutions that make them feel safe and in a welcoming space.”
Musk agreed Twitter should “make people feel comfortable.” But then he suggested Samuels’s entire premise might not matter.
“I don’t know if you know this, but Puff is an investor in Twitter,” he said, using a nickname for Combs. “You know, he’s a good friend of mine. We text a lot.”
Some of the Twitter executives had to resist the urge to bury their heads in their hands.
>>> November 3 was an abnormally warm November day in Manhattan, and the sun heated the roof deck at Twitter’s New York office to nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit. More than fifty employees headed upstairs to gather together one final time. They traded phone numbers and chatted about job opportunities, then arranged themselves on the patio furniture and posed for a picture. There were a few forced smiles.
Everyone was convinced it was their final day at Twitter. Earlier that day, employees had noticed that their days of rest, the monthly no-meeting, recharge days, had been removed from their calendars. The new owner was sending a message.
Musk’s transition team had also ordered the shuttering of the internal company directory, known as Birdhouse, which listed people’s titles and chain of command. Without it, workers wouldn’t be able to see who was left at the company, or, conversely, determine who had been fired.
By 5:00 p.m. that afternoon in San Francisco, some employees had thought they had survived another day. Still, workers around the globe, some who stayed online long past the end of the working days, remained vigilant.
“Has the red wedding started? 
“” one London-based marketing employee joked in a public Slack channel, alluding to an episode in the popular television show Game of Thrones where several main characters are surprisingly and brutally murdered.
“Cant see org chart on birdhouse?” another worker wrote at 5:04. “Did they change that?”
just now, right?
directory is gone too.
It breaks regularly
Thirteen minutes later, they got the email they were all expecting: “Update regarding our Workforce”
In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.
To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended. If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.
We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted. Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.
The email, signed by a faceless “Twitter” and not Musk himself, explained that those who were safe would receive confirmation via their work emails. Those who were not would be notified of their terminations to their personal email addresses by 9:00 a.m. the following morning.
But while Musk had been unconcerned with the scope of the cuts, he had insisted on getting final authority over the message that was sent to employees. Pacini had written three versions of the email for him. The first was quintessentially Twitter 1.0—it apologized for the cuts and wished employees well. The second was a middle ground that laid out the news with few platitudes. And the final version was the most cold and curt. That was the one Musk had picked.
When the email hit their inboxes, some workers were congregated in the Lodge, a wood-paneled common area inside Twitter’s headquarters that was decked out with two miniature log cabins where employees sometimes relaxed or held conference calls. The Lodge served beer alongside coffee, and video screens lining the walls often broadcasted sports games. Shortly after, security guards came in and cleared everyone out of the round tables and cozy cabins. The building was closing, they said.
Twitter employees headed downstairs to await their fate. On the ground floor of Twitter’s headquarters was a gourmet food hall called the Market, which sold groceries and grab-and-go lunches. Crucially, it also had a small bar in the back. Workers flooded in, overwhelming the lone bartender who had no idea about the bloodbath that loomed from above. As she frantically poured beer, the overcrowded bar felt like the last day of camp, with everyone commiserating about the summer while they waited for their parents to come pick them up. Some of the workers from Musk’s other companies trickled in, too, gathering on one side of the room.
Everyone kept their phones gripped in their hands, frantically scrolling Slack as they drank. Although Musk’s message had promised that terminated employees would receive email notifications, many of those who were cut were not even afforded that small dignity. The layoffs were unprecedented in Twitter history, and its engineers had simply not had enough time to properly build an off-boarding system that would send out the required emails and cut off access to all internal systems simultaneously. The system ran haywire, and employees found that they had abruptly been locked out of their work computers or email accounts.
Some were banished from Slack, while others maintained access even though they had been locked out of email. The employees who remained vented their sadness and frustration by posting blue heart emojis in Slack, while others shared memes. One person posted an image of a scene from Avengers: Infinity War in which Thanos, the main antagonist, gains powers that allow him to eliminate half of all life in the universe with the snap of his fingers. This was Twitter’s own mass extinction event. Employees began referring to it as their “snap.”
As employees chimed in about their own layoff experiences, or piped up to say they still appeared to be safe, tweeps began flooding Slack with the salute emoji. The stern-faced symbol became a favorite among Twitter employees as the perfect encapsulation of the solidarity and sense of duty they felt as they ground ahead at work that year under the distractions of Musk.
“Can’t log into emails. Mac wont turn on,” one London-based tweep tweeted, sharing photos of his laptop screen and his email log-in page. “But so grateful this is happening at 3am. Really appreciate the thoughtfulness on the timing front guys.”
The layoffs were like a brushfire that spread across an open field. They arrived in New York and along the East Coast, and then workers in London and Dublin received emails saying that they were in roles that have been “identified as potentially impacted or at risk of redundancy.” Some in California and Seattle received termination emails around 11:00 p.m. In Tokyo, employees worked through most of their shifts on Friday before receiving notices toward the end of the day.
Inside the Market, employees kept glancing down at their phones. As some of them received their termination notices, they shouted to the room that they were out.
“I just got the message,” one yelled.
“It was nice working with everyone,” said another.
As the night wore on and the layoff emails kept landing, Twitter’s workforce trickled across Market Street to the Beer Hall, a dark taproom that had hosted countless goodbye parties for departing tweeps over the years. They continued drinking there until the late hours of the night. Some workers didn’t get their layoff notices until they stumbled home, while others woke up to the messages the following morning.
Even those who were working on Musk’s pet projects weren’t safe. After 9:00 p.m. on Thursday evening, Crawford summoned her team to join their nightly “standup” meeting, in which they shared updates about the Blue Verified project.
“I recognize this is a crazy moment where Tweeps are losing access and the layoff is in progress,” she wrote in a Slack group for the team. She included a broken heart emoji and a link to a video conference line.
After the meeting started at 9:30 that night and Crawford began going over the work that had been done, two employees suddenly dropped off the call. The workers found themselves unable to get back on because they were locked out of their emails and computers. Realizing what had happened, they texted their Blue teammates to tell them that they were out. As word of the layoffs rippled through the meeting, people’s faces sank, but Crawford pressed on.