On Thursday afternoon last week at Twitter’s San Francisco offices, costumed employees brawled at the company’s Halloween party while a magician performed tricks. Some attendees speculated that the emcee for the event, dressed in a scarecrow suit, was Elon Musk, who was then hours away from becoming the new owner of Twitter (the emcee was not Musk). According to a person who was present at the event, a Twitter employee guessed wrong in the wizard’s three-card monte game, prompting another employee to joke, “You’re fired.”
At the end of this week, there was no humor in that joke. Starting Thursday night, Musk began a brutal wave of layoffs at Twitter, which were expected to reduce the company’s workforce by about 50%. Some who were laid off found themselves disconnected from their computers while writing an email or sitting on a video call, and others woke up to find themselves locked out of their corporate email and Slack accounts. Teams working on product and engineering for advertising, public relations and data centers were hit hard. Some of those who survived the layoffs found themselves ambivalent and envious of their laid-off colleagues, who took months off work while carrying double the workload.
The holiday covered one of the most extraordinary seven days for any company. While dramatic changes often follow corporate acquisitions, they rarely happen with the ferocity of events on Twitter, where Musk immediately fired some of the company’s top executives after completing his acquisition last week and ordered employees to blow up projects in what many considered inconceivable. tight deadlines. Some workers set up sleeping bags in the office so they could pull all-nighters to achieve those goals as the threat of impending vacations loomed over their heads.
