In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a company summit called #OneTeam. At the event, Jack Dorsey, the then CEO of Twitter, revealed that he had invited a surprise guest. Then, with a wave and a smile, Elon Musk appeared on giant screens above the stage. The crowd cheered, clapped and clenched fists. “We love you,” an employee shouted.
Today on Twitter, surprising announcements about Mr. Musk otherwise inside. Workers said they had largely stopped celebrating the world’s richest man since he declared his intent this month to buy Twitter, scrap its content moderation policy and turn the publicly traded company into a private company. On Monday, Twitter announced 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 they had heard little from management about what it meant to them, even as Twitter struck a deal with Mr. Musk Monday morning. They asked their chief executive, Parag Agrawal. They asked Mr. Musk himself in questions sent on Twitter. Some even went to Charles Schwab, the financial company that manages their stock options, for clarity about the impact a sale of the company would have on them.
But they didn’t get many answers before Mr. Musk’s bid passed, said 11 Twitter employees who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, even as it became clear they would soon report to Mr Musk .
On Monday afternoon, Mr Agrawal and Twitter chairman Bret Taylor finally met with employees to discuss the deal. The compensation would remain largely the same under Mr. Musk, Mr. Agrawal said, but he didn’t make the same guarantees about Twitter’s policies and culture.
“We are constantly developing our policies,” Mr Agrawal said in response to a question from an associate about whether former President Donald J. Trump would be allowed back on the platform. “Once the deal is closed, we don’t know where this company will go.”
The silence over the negotiations is routine in takeover battles, Taylor told employees. Because the board of directors consults with bankers, lawyers and expensive PR agencies, employees often feel in the dark. But for the employees of Twitter, a company that has billed itself as the world’s city square, it was particularly bittersweet to find out what’s happening to their business, primarily through Twitter, the service they’ve built.
Read more about Elon Musk’s offer on Twitter
After years of leadership squabbles, change requests from activist investors and Mr. Trump, Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees are used to unrest. But some of them say the mercurial billionaire takeover has affected them in ways other corporate crises have not.
Employees said they were concerned that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work they put into cleaning up the platform’s toxic corners, increase their stock compensation while taking the company private and disrupt Twitter culture. with his unpredictable management style and abrupt proclamations.
But Mr. Musk also has fans under Twitter and some employees have welcomed his offer. In an internal Slack post from The New York Times asking if employees were excited about Mr. Musk, about 10 people responded with a “Yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesperson 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 wildcard is: what if it becomes a completely different company than what they thought they were working for? It’s an awkward working relationship,” he says.
Mr. Musk has made clear some of his intentions in registrations, tweets and public appearances: The company is required to remove almost all of its moderation policies, which ban content such as violent threats, harassment and spam. It should provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to drive tweets in users’ news feeds. And it should be a private company.
Twitter has expanded its content moderation policy since 2008, when the 25th employee was hired specifically to fight abuse on its platform. The teams overseeing moderation and security have grown to hundreds of employees.
Many Twitter employees feel personally involved in the company’s efforts to encourage healthy conversation — even if they don’t work directly to moderate the content — and have pressured executives to continue to spread hate speech and misinformation. to tackle, according to six employees. They see Mr Musk’s proposal to return to Twitter’s early, lax approach as a rebuke to their work.
But other employees have argued in internal reports from The Times that their colleagues have shifted too far to the left of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr Musk’s plans too uneasy to say anything. In an employee survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace assessment 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.
While Twitter executives and employees have agreed with Mr. Musk about changes to the algorithm, that work is in its early stages and could take years to complete. That could test something Mr. Musk isn’t exactly known for: patience.
One of the biggest concerns among Twitter employees is whether they will take a financial hit from the acquisition of Mr. musk. Many Twitter employees get 50 percent or more of their total compensation from Twitter stock. Some employees said they were afraid of missing out on the long-term value of their shares at Mr. Musk’s price of $54.20 a share.
At Monday’s meeting with employees, executives tried to assure employees that they would not be short of the Mr. Musk acquisition. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would be converted to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which is estimated to take between three and six months. Employees would receive the same benefits for a year after the deal was completed.
In a previous effort to allay financial concerns, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett told employees that any potential buyer would most likely have to keep the employee’s equity “as is” or offer equivalent compensation, such as a cash prize.
Mr. Edgett, who made his comments before announcing the deal with Mr. Musk, emphasized that employees should not view his guidance as insight into closing the deal. “This is intended to provide peace of mind and explain how these things typically work, not because we believe there will be one outcome versus another,” he wrote in posts to employees reviewed by The Times.
Twitter is busy hiring and spent $630 million on share-based compensation in 2021, up 33 percent from the previous year. Twitter predicted in a February earnings report that it would spend between $900 million and $925 million in stock-based compensation this year.
But Mr. Musk’s campaign has also begun to undermine Twitter’s efforts to recruit new employees, according to internal documents detailing the company’s recruiting efforts, which were reviewed by The Times. Potential contributors have expressed skepticism about Mr. Musk’s plans to transform Twitter and overturn content moderation, those documents said.
Recruits were also concerned that the shares in their offer letters could quickly be devalued if Mr. Musk took Twitter private.
Twitter’s recruiting problem could get even worse if its current employees quit, as some have warned they would if Mr. Musk took over. Other employees were concerned about layoffs or loss of work visas under Mr. Musk and raised questions about these issues with Mr. Agrawal.
Managers responsible for hiring have been asked to track how many potential employees are turning down jobs because of fears of Mr. Musk, according to internal communications reviewed by The Times.
Employees also wondered: Could he also move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, as he did with Tesla? Can he end the company’s flexibility to return to the office, which has become a selling point for employees and recruits? After all, Mr. Musk battled officials in California to keep his auto plant open early in the pandemic.
Mr. Agrawal tried to calm his staff. In Monday’s question-and-answer session, he urged employees to “use Twitter as we’ve always done,” adding that “how we run the business, the decisions we make, and the positive changes we make – that is up to us, and under our control.”
The stress of naming Mr. Musk is in stark contrast to the welcome he received from his employees two years ago. While some employees at the 2020 event said they were skeptical of Mr. Musk, many of them listened intently as he gave his advice for Twitter: The company should step up its moderation, he said, by doing more to protect bots and scammers. eradicate the actual people using the platform.
“By the way, do you want to use Twitter?” mr. Dorsey asked Mr. musk.
The assembled Twitter employees laughed. Mr. Musk didn’t answer right away.
Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac reporting contributed.
