Elon Musk fired Twitter’s entire team of data engineers after taking control of the social media platform on Thursday.
A stream of engineers walked out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying boxes on Friday. They stopped to speak with reportes outside. One former Twitter engineer told reporters he owns a Tesla.
David Johnson, pictured above right, said he worked at Twitter for over 6 years and he doesn’t know how he’s going to make his Tesla car payment next month.
“It’s somewhere I worked at for six years and everything suddenly changed,” Johnson said. A reporter said he seemed “visibly shaken” as he left the building.
Musk is still cleaning house after firing Twitter’s top executives including head of content moderation Vijaya Gadde, the woman who famously banned Trump from Twitter in 2020.
Musk reportedly said he plans to reverse all lifetime bans, enabling banned users to return, including former President Donald Trump. But it isn’t clear if Trump will return since he has his own social media platform called Truth Social.
On Friday, Trump said he’s glad Twitter is now in Elon Musk’s “sane hands”.
Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms in 2020.
On Thursday, Musk fired trust & safety chief Vijaya Gadde, the woman who famously banned Trump from Twitter in 2020.
Musk also terminated Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and head of finance Ned Segal on Thursday. Both men were hastily escorted from the building on Thursday night.
Musk is set to hold a town hall meeting to formally introduce himself to employees later today.
One employee tweeted, “I am fully expecting him to fire 69% of us on Friday at 4:20 p.m.”
