Early in November, Twitter’s roughly 7,500 workers acquired a terse e-mail from a generic deal with: “In an effort to put Twitter on a wholesome path, we’ll undergo the tough strategy of lowering our world work pressure.” The notice was signed “Twitter.” On Nov. 3, some folks on the firm acquired emails indicating they might be laid off the subsequent day.
That night time, Ms. Solomon, her husband and some colleagues headed to Dots Cafe Portland, a lounge on Clinton Avenue. Telephones had been on the desk, face up, she mentioned. Because the work buddies talked, they tapped away at their telephones, participating in chats on the Sign app with colleagues in London, Seattle and San Francisco. Messages like “I received hit” had been flying throughout screens, Ms. Solomon recalled. “You had been seeing your co-workers drop like flies,” she mentioned.
By the subsequent afternoon her crew of about 10 engineers was decreased to 4. Ms. Solomon and her husband had survived the spherical of layoffs. The subsequent week, she recalled, she awaited additional course from Mr. Musk or the brand new government crew. Nothing got here, she mentioned, aside from an e-mail alerting workers that distant work would not be permitted, with few exceptions.
Many workers discovered of Mr. Musk’s priorities by watching his Twitter feed, the place he posted incessantly about firm enterprise to his greater than 100 million followers. On Nov. 5, he complained concerning the platform’s search operate: “Search inside Twitter jogs my memory of Infoseek in ’98! That may also get rather a lot higher pronto,” he wrote. That very same day, he tweeted: “Twitter will quickly add capability to connect long-form textual content to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots.”
That was greater than Ms. Solomon and plenty of of her colleagues had heard internally. “Radio silence,” she mentioned. She started to vent her frustration on Twitter.
Certainly one of her first tweets on this vein got here on Nov. 6, shortly after Mr. Musk introduced a brand new rule for Twitter customers in a tweet: “Any title change in any respect will trigger short-term lack of verified checkmark,” he wrote. He had posted that message after many individuals on Twitter had modified their names to variations on Mr. Musk’s title, most of them mocking.