Seemingly filled with dread

Amid Elon Musk buyout, some Twitter workers are seemingly filled with dread

Joshua Bote

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk coming into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters Thursday, sink in hand, appeared to bring an air of anticipation inside the building in addition to his corny punning.

But the sentiment inside the San Francisco tech giant, at least from a few employees posting on the anonymous job forum Blind, seems to be doom and gloom — largely stemming from the “Chief Twit’s” decision to reportedly buy and gut the company by a remarkable 75% — a move that at least one industry insider appeared to endorse. (As expected, he walked back that number but anticipated layoffs.)

“At this point there is no upside left,” one anonymous Twitter employee said, when a prospective employee asked about a potential job opportunity within the company. That worker cited impending layoffs, a decline in work-life balance and stress as the reasons.

Another Twitter worker, meanwhile, shared that current employees have resorted to joking about the impending layoffs.

“To be honest, we’re sharing a lot of these internally as a kind of gallows humor, so keep it coming,” the employee said in response to a thread about memes and jokes dunking on the company.

“What’s weirder is people dancing on the grave of one of the last big tech WLB+good pay places that either could have been a future employee or a leveragable counter offer,” the writer added.

Given that concerns about the death of work-life balance at Twitter have popped up repeatedly, it appears that any survivors of the Musk Thanos snap are worried they’ll be worked to the bone — much like Musk demands at Tesla and SpaceX.

So even as Musk proclaims that he’s “meeting a lot of cool people at Twitter” and photos show throngs of people enraptured by Musk, it appears there remains a healthy contingency of skeptics within the company.