In early November, Twitter’s approximately 7,500 employees received a terse email from a generic address: “In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce.” The note was signed “Twitter.” On November 3, some people at the company received emails saying they would be fired the next day.
That evening, Mrs. Solomon, her husband, and a few colleagues went to Dots Cafe Portland, a lounge on Clinton Street. Phones were on the table, face up, she said. As the work buddies chatted, they tapped their phones and engaged in chats on the Signal app with colleagues in London, Seattle and San Francisco. Messages like “I’ve been hit” flew across the screens, Ms. Solomon recalled. “You saw your colleagues dropping like flies,” she said.
By the next afternoon, her team of about 10 engineers had been reduced to four. Mrs. Solomon and her husband had survived the round of layoffs. The following week, she recalled, she waited for further direction from Mr. Musk or the new executive team. Nothing came, she said, except for an email warning employees that remote work would no longer be allowed, with few exceptions.
Many employees learned of Mr. Musk’s priorities by checking out his Twitter feed, where he regularly posted messages about the company’s affairs to his more than 100 million followers. On November 5, he complained about the platform’s search function: “Search query on Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in ’98! That will also get a lot better,” he wrote. That same day, he tweeted: “Twitter will soon to add ability to add long text to tweets, ending the absurdity of notepad screenshots.
That was more than Ms. Solomon and many of her colleagues had heard internally. “Radio silence,” she said. She started venting her frustration on Twitter.
One of her first tweets in this vein came on Nov. 6, shortly after Mr. Musk announced a new rule for Twitter users in a tweet: “Any name change will result in temporary loss of verified check mark,” he wrote. He had posted that message after many people on Twitter changed their names to variations of Mr. Musk’s name, most of them mockingly.
