As the takeover fight played out 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 in on a deal with Elon Musk.
’The wild card is, what if it becomes a very different company than they thought they were working for? It’s an uncomfortable working relationship,’ said David Larcker, a professor of accounting and corporate governance at Stanford University. In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a corporate summit called #OneTeam. During the event, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time, revealed he had invited a surprise guest.
This kind of silence that hovered over the week of negotiations is routine in takeover fights. As 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 is happening to their company primarily through Twitter, the service they built, has been particularly embittering.
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 they thought they were working for? It’s an uncomfortable working relationship,” he said.
But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by the Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up. In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace review app, 44% said they were neutral on Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Musk, while 27% said they hated him.
Edgett, who made his comments before the deal with Musk was announced, stressed that employees should not view his guidance as insight into the deal-making. “This is meant to provide some peace of mind and explain how these things typically work, not because we believe there will be one outcome versus another,” he wrote in messages to employees reviewed by the Times.
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