Elon Musk’s turbulent takeover of Twitter saw him establish a sycophantic inner circle of loyalists who were too afraid to tell him the truth, a former director at the firm has claimed.
In a video posted to the platform on Wednesday, the company’s ex-director of product management Esther Crawford—who went viral last year after posting a photo of herself sleeping on the floor at Twitter HQ in a sleeping bag—shared her opinions on X and its future under Elon Musk.
Crawford, who sold her social app Squad to Twitter in 2020, went on to work for Twitter for two and a half years before being laid off.
She described the pre-Musk Twitter as “siloed and bureaucratic,” and a place where “dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly.”
“You couldn’t just be a builder—you also needed to be a politician,” she said. “There was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls.”
Twitter 2.0’s ‘brutalist and hard-core culture’
In the lead-up to Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Crawford said she knew little about him but was optimistic about what he might do with the firm.
“I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so [I thought] perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company,” she said.
However, the reality of working under his stewardship came with multiple challenges, according to Crawford—including Musk’s unpredictability and the workload feeling “like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode.”
“I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all,” she said. “I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hard-core culture.”
Crawford described Musk as “oddly charming” but said as a leader he was both inspirational and lacking in empathy to a “painful” degree.
“The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry,” she said. “Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.”
‘Fanatical’ inner circle afraid to tell Musk the truth
As a people manager, Musk has often made headlines for his divisive tactics.
Following the Twitter acquisition in October, the company reportedly suffered a wave of resignations after he demanded employees sign an oath to work “long hours at high intensity.” It came shortly after the social media firm began layoffs that would cut around half of its workforce.
Musk’s reputation for questionable management practices stretches far beyond his tenure at the helm of Twitter, however, with employees at his other companies Tesla and SpaceX going public in the past with grievances about the way they were treated at work.
According to Crawford, Twitter employees soon learned to cherry-pick the information they relayed to Musk after he took over as the company’s CEO (a position he relinquished to former NBCUniversal advertising exec Linda Yaccarino last month).
“At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said,” Crawford alleged on Wednesday. “When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.”
Gut instinct
However, it didn’t appear to matter whether Twitter employees were honest with Musk, Crawford suggested, as most of the decisions made at the company were based on him following his gut instinct. She noted that he did not seem interested in seeking out data or expertise to inform his business choices and was “obviously not afraid of blowing things up.”
“That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions,” she said. “Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it.”
Twitter began its rebrand to "X" over the weekend, as part of Musk's ambition to create an “everything app.”
A spokesperson for X did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on Crawford’s testimony.
When it came to the future of X, Crawford suggested, the platform could either thrive or die. While Musk was gifted with an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems, Crawford said, he lacked the social-emotional intelligence to make the product soar.
“Social networks are hard to kill, but they’re not immune from death spirals,” she said. “Only time will tell what the outcome will be, but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers.”
“I disagree with many of [Musk’s] decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new and innovative may emerge,” she added. “I hope it does.”
