So Far, Musk Has Made at Least 1 Twitter Employee Throw Up
Some Twitter employees can’t stomach Elon Musk’s ownership of the company, in the most literal sense.
One engineering manager at the San Francisco company was driven to vomiting in a trash can when he was told to fire several hundred co-workers, according to Fox News, citing a report from the New York Times published Friday.
That anecdote — mentioned twice — was what Fox termed the Times’ “big takeaway” after devoting eight reporters and 2,598 words to how things are going at the social media giant after Musk took command in late October.
The employee of the Big Tech firm had been approached by Musk’s “goons,” as they’ve been termed by the company’s legacy employees, according to the Times.
The manager proceeded to vomit into a nearby trash can after being presented with a list of hundreds of employees to be given pink slips.
The Times painted a picture of dramatic changes following Musk’s contentious acquisition of Twitter, citing 36 current and former Twitter employees.
Musk has enacted a round of layoffs after finalizing his purchase of the company, citing Twitter’s precarious financial position.
The billionaire fired half of the company’s 7,500 employees last week, according to the Times.
The firings have reportedly spurred chaos at the company, with many platform services ceasing to function amid Musk’s internal changes.
The entrepreneur rejected a suggestion from legacy Twitter executives to discriminate against white employees in the layoffs by reviewing for “diversity and inclusion issues” to avoid impacting non-white Twitter employees “disproportionately,” the Times reported.
The billionaire has moved to transform Twitter into a payment-based platform, in which users who pay $8 a month will be granted algorithmic advantages similar to those of advertisers.
Some of Musk’s early reforms appear to have drawn more users to the platform, with Twitter usage at an all-time high, according to the South African-born billionaire.
Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2022
Twitter pioneered the mass censorship of the internet under its previous ownership, establishing a standard in which conservatives and other critics of the left were purged from the digital public square with impunity.
It’s not lost on many that these practices were damaging to American democracy as well as internet freedom.
Twitter arguably interfered in the 2020 presidential election by censoring stories regarding Hunter Biden, falsely claiming that such materials were obtained through hacking.
Musk has expressed his intention to restore Twitter’s reputation as a free speech platform, but major reforms to the platform’s content moderation and censorship policies are yet to take effect.
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