Twitter's Woke Employees Outraged Over Elon Musk's Takeover, Reveal Their Biggest Fear
Leaked records of Twitter’s internal communications reveal just how shrill and woke the company’s employees are, leaving little doubt as to how the social media giant became a bastion for group think, censorship and radical, left-wing bias.
Twitter’s left-wing employees were outraged, of course, after the company’s board reversed its position and on Monday announced it had decided to accept Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the company.
Musk’s move to purchase Twitter began on April 4 when he revealed he had bought 9.2 percent of the company for a reported $2.9 billion, at the time making him Twitter’s largest shareholder. The next day, Twitter announced that Musk was invited to join the company’s board of directors.
However, on April 14, after Musk rejected the limitations the company put on its offer of a board seat, the SpaceX boss announced he “made an offer” to purchase the company outright. Musk offered shareholders $54.20 per share, a “54% premium over the closing price of the Common Stock on January 28, 2022.”
At first, the board was so against the purchase that it enacted a “poison pill” rule to try to prevent Musk from purchasing more shares. A poison pill allows shareholders to buy up cheap shares in a company, diluting the commanding stake that an investor such as Musk holds.
But all of a sudden, after the world’s richest man proved he could raise the cash to buy the company, the board did an about-face.
Those weeks of whirlwind business drama have sent the company’s employees into a tailspin, if the evidence of the leaked communications among Twitter’s employees is any indication.
The messages were posted on Twitter Slack channels, an app that allows a company to keep its employees connected online.
One topic that drove the conversation appears to be the employees’ disconnect over free speech.
“Physically cringy watching Elon talk about free speech,” wrote an employee who claims to be nonbinary transgender, according to the New York Post.
Another wrote about how Twitter employees are going through the “five stages of grief.”
That same senior worker also dipped into another topic of worry seen in many Slack entries. He worried that Musk would reinstate President Donald Trump’s account and allow him to begin tweeting again.
“We’re all going through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone’s nerves are frazzled,” a senior staff software engineer wrote after calling Musk an “a**hole.” “We’re all spinning our wheels, and coming up with worst case scenarios (Trump returns! No more moderation!). The fact is that [Musk] has not talked about what he’s planning on doing in any detail outside of broad sweeping statements that could be easily seen as hyperbolic showboating.”
There were other proclamations, too. Yet another employee pledged to quit the company once Musk takes control.
Many employees were disgusted over Musk’s stated desire of working to reinstitute a freer and fairer forum for free speech. These employees nearly to a person said they wanted more censorship and less free speech, not the opposite.
One claimed, for instance, that the desire for free speech “is cover for ‘I want to not be held accountable for saying or amplifying harmful things.'”
There were other concerns, too. The Post added that there were complaints that Twitter allowed conservative journalists such as Andy Ngo to belong to the service, while some claimed Musk would somehow put minorities in danger with his free-speech ideals. There also were employees who said more free speech would endanger democracy.
The latter included former Twitter exec Laura Gomez, who outlandishly insisted that a Musk-owned Twitter is “one of the greatest threats to the 2022 and 2024 elections. We are f*cked if this happens,” the Post reported her as saying.
At this point, we aren’t sure what Musk really means when he says he wants to reinstate free speech on Twitter. But so far, his pursuit of the company has revealed just how extreme and biased the employees are. And it also reveals why Musk felt he needed to step in in the first place.
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