Twitter Employees Search for Answers as Musk Takeover Becomes Reality

In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a corporate summit called #OneTeam. During the event, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, revealed that he had invited a surprise guest. Then, with a wave and a smile, Elon Musk appeared on the giant screens above the stage. The crowd cheered, clapped and pumped their fists. “We love you,” shouted an employee.

Inside Twitter today, surprising announcements about Mr. Musk come differently. Employees said they had stopped celebrating the world’s richest man since he announced his intention this month to buy Twitter, scrap its content moderation policies and transform the publicly traded company into a private. On Monday, Twitter announced that it had accepted Mr. Musk’s offer to buy the company for about $44 billion.

As the takeover battle unfolded over the past two weeks, Twitter employees said they were frustrated that they had heard little from management about what it meant for them, even as Twitter closed a deal with Mr. Musk on Monday morning. . They asked their chief executive, Parag Agrawal. They asked Mr. Musk himself in questions sent to Twitter. Some even went to Charles Schwab, the financial firm that manages their stock options, for clarity about the impact a sale of the company would have on them.

But they weren’t getting much of a response before Mr. Musk’s bid succeeded, said 11 Twitter employees who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, even as it became clear they may soon found themselves reporting to Mr. Musk. .

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Agrawal and Twitter chairman Bret Taylor finally met with employees to discuss the deal. Compensation will remain largely the same under Mr. Musk, Mr. Agrawal said, but he did not make the same assurances about Twitter’s policies and culture.

“We’re constantly evolving our policies,” Mr. Agrawal said in response to a staffer’s question about whether former President Donald J. Trump would be allowed back on the platform. “Once the deal closes, we don’t know where this company will go.”

The silence that hangs over negotiations is routine in power struggles, Mr. Taylor told employees. While the board of directors confers with bankers, lawyers and expensive public relations firms, employees are often kept in the dark. But for employees at Twitter, a company that has billed itself as the world’s town square, finding out what’s going on with their company primarily through Twitter, the service they built, was especially bittersweet.

After years of executive wrangling, demands for change from activist investors and Mr. Trump’s boundary-testing tweets, Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees have grown accustomed to turmoil. But some of them say the billionaire takeover has hit them in ways that other corporate crises have not.

Employees said they were worried that Mr. Musk would undo years of work they had done to clean up toxic corners of the platform, change their stock compensation in the company’s privatization process and disrupt Twitter’s culture with the style of his unpredictable and unexpected management. announcements.

But Mr. Musk also has fans in the Twitter ranks, and some employees have welcomed his offer. In an internal Slack message seen by The New York Times that asked if employees were excited for Mr. Musk, about 10 people responded with a “Yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

If Twitter is worth buying, much of its value is in the employees who build and manage the service, said David Larcker, a professor of accounting and corporate governance at Stanford University. “The wild card is, what if it becomes a very different company than the one they thought they were working for? It’s an uncomfortable working relationship,” he said.

Mr. Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company should drop nearly all of its moderation policies, which prohibit content such as violent threats, harassment and spam . It should provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ news feeds. And it should become a private company.

Twitter has expanded its content moderation policies since 2008, when its 25th employee was hired specifically to combat abuse on its platform. The teams overseeing moderation and security have now grown to hundreds of employees.

Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s efforts to encourage healthy conversation — even if they don’t work directly on content moderation — and have pushed executives to further crack down on hate speech and misinformation, six employees said. They see Mr. Musk’s proposal to return to Twitter’s early, lean approach as a rebuke to their work.

But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have moved too far to the left of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak out. In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace screening app, 44 percent said they were neutral about Mr. Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Mr. Musk, while 27 percent said they hated him.

Although executives and employees at Twitter have agreed with Mr. Musk on changes to its algorithm, that work is in the early stages and could take years to complete. This could test something Mr Musk is not particularly known for – patience.

One of the main concerns among Twitter employees is whether they will take a financial hit from Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Many Twitter employees make 50 percent or more of their total compensation from Twitter stock. Some employees said they feared losing the long-term value of their shares at Mr. Musk’s price of $54.20 a share.

In meeting with employees on Monday, executives tried to reassure employees that they would not lose Mr. Musk’s buyout. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would be converted to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he said would take between three and six months. Employees would receive the same benefits packages for a year after the deal is finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added.

In an earlier effort to quell financial concerns, Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, told employees that any potential buyer would likely be required to keep employee equity “as is” or provide equivalent compensation. as a cash prize.

Mr. Edgett, who made his comments before the deal with Mr. Musk was announced, stressed that employees should not view his guidance as a reflection on the deal. “This is meant to provide peace of mind and explain how these things work, not because we believe there will be one outcome over another,” he wrote in the employee messages reviewed by The Times.

Twitter has been on a hiring spree, spending $630 million on stock-based compensation in 2021, a 33 percent increase from last year. Twitter predicted in a February earnings report that it would spend between $900 million and $925 million on stock-based compensation this year.

But Mr. Musk’s campaign has also begun to scale back Twitter’s efforts to recruit new employees, according to internal documents outlining the company’s hiring efforts seen by The Times. Potential hires have expressed skepticism about Mr. Musk’s plans to transform Twitter and improve its content moderation, those documents said.

Recruits have also worried that the shares included in their offer letters could quickly depreciate if Mr. Musk takes Twitter private.

Twitter’s recruiting problem could grow further if current employees leave, as some have warned they would if Mr. Musk takes over. Other employees worried about layoffs or losing work visas under Mr. Musk and raised questions about those issues with Mr. Agrawal.

Hiring managers have been asked to keep track of how many potential employees turn down job offers because of fears about Mr. Musk, according to internal communications reviewed by The Times.

Employees have also wondered: Could he also move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, as he did with Tesla? Could it end the company’s back-to-office flexibility, which has become a selling point for employees and recruits? Mr Musk, after all, fought with officials in California to keep his car factory open at the start of the pandemic.

Mr. Agrawal tried to appease his workforce. In a question-and-answer session Monday, he urged employees to “operate Twitter as always,” adding that “how we run the company, the decisions we make and the positive changes we make — that’s going to be up to us. , and under our control.”

The stress in Mr. Musk’s mention is a stark contrast to the welcome he received from employees two years ago. Although some employees at the 2020 event said they were skeptical of Mr. Musk, many listened intently as he offered his advice for Twitter: The company needs to increase its moderation, he said, by doing more to eliminate bots and the scammers. by actual people using the platform.

“By the way, do you want to run Twitter?” Mr. Dorsey asked Mr. Musk.

The assembled Twitter staff laughed. Mr. Musk did not immediately respond.

Ryan Mac AND Mike Isaac contributed to the reporting.