Hundreds of Twitter’s remaining employees have resigned ahead of Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company, according to internal Slack posts seen by The edge and tweets from employees.
The new purge of Twitter’s ranks comes after Musk recently fired dozens of employees who criticized or mocked him in tweets and internal posts. Musk then set a deadline at 5 p.m. ET on Thursday for all employees to answer “yes” in Google form if they want to stay for what he calls “Twitter 2.0”; otherwise today would be their last day of work and they would receive severance pay. After the deadline was reached, hundreds of employees quickly began posting goodbye messages and salute emojis to Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum.
Twitter had about 2,900 employees remaining before the Thursday deadline, thanks to Musk unceremoniously firing about half of its 7,500 workforce when he took over and the layoffs that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The edge that given the magnitude of the layoffs this week, they expect the platform to break soon. One said they’ve seen “legendary engineers” and others look up to leave one by one.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It’s going to be extremely hard for Twitter to get rid of this, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
“I’ve been here at Twitter for over 11 years,” another wrote in Twitter’s Slack. “In July, I was the 27th most tenured employee at the company. Now I am the 15th.”
“I’m not pressing the button,” another wrote in Slack. “My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I don’t want to be part of Twitter 2.0”
“Where are all these chopped onions coming from,” read another post.
Departing employees also tweeted their decision:
