By now, the outlines of the story are well-known: a staff of 7,500 slashed by 75%; a free-speech absolutism that welcomed banned users back to the platform, along with a surge of hate speech and misinformation; an advertising crisis in which more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers shut their purses; and a confounding corporate rebrand that replaced Twitter and the familiar tweet with a literal Brand X.
And throughout it all, nonstop drama. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the world’s richest person, has defined his conquest of Twitter by innovating on spectacle above all. With each curious or controversial move since acquiring the social media company, Musk’s most successful feat has been forcing the world to pay attention.
Time will tell if Musk’s $44 billion takeover will become a business-school case study in how to rejuvenate a company and pivot it toward a brighter future, or a lesson in how rapidly unrestrained hubris can destroy value. Whatever the eventual verdict, the voices of those who experienced the events firsthand offer crucial testimony about the circumstances, motivations, and actions that shaped the story’s critical moments. And they paint a revealing portrait of life inside Musk’s controversial project, with all the conflicting emotions and perspectives.
Fortune interviewed eight people who were present during key moments of Twitter’s Muskification. We’ve anonymized most names but tried to distinguish individual speakers. We’ve edited their comments for clarity or length when necessary, but otherwise present their accounts in their own words in this oral history of the first year at Twitter under the Musk regime.
Chapter 1
It’s Elon’s company now
Within minutes of the acquisition closing on Oct. 27, 2022, Twitter’s senior leadership team is fired by Musk, who famously marched into company headquarters hours earlier carrying a sink (“Let that sink in!” he joked in the video he tweeted of his entrance). For Twitter staffers, the next few weeks will be a blurry jumble of confusion, hope, fear, chaos—and for thousands, after just a few days under the new regime, layoffs.
The first days
“So much of what was going on we learned as it happened on the service, right? Musk showing up at the office, the sink thing, that moment where he was milling around the coffee bar. All of these were things that moved exceptionally quickly, and employees were just sort of like, huh, okay, I guess that’s happening now.” —Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety
“We had a Tesla channel in Slack, and people were starting to say dumb things like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get Teslas now’ or whatever. But the consensus was that most people weren’t happy. They were worried for their jobs. They were worried for their culture and the environment. And just a very, very low minority were excited.” —X employee 1
“We had a Tesla channel in Slack, and people were starting to say dumb things like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get Teslas now’ or whatever.”
X employee 1
“The culture became hostile fast. You weren’t sure who was part of the gestapo and who wasn’t, like who was reporting you to Elon for saying X, Y, and Z. People became a lot more guarded.” —Former HR employee
Brace for layoffs
“The night of the layoffs, no one really had any idea what was going on, and people were just starting to say, like, ‘I’m locked out of my machine.’ It was such a harbinger of things to come. It showed—not just from an attitude perspective and the potential callousness of the new leadership—but it was also just the chaos of it.
“I was just thinking, what the hell is tomorrow going to be? It was a mix of minor relief that I still had a job, I still was going to get a paycheck, I could delay figuring out what the hell to do next. But at the same time, it was also like shock … maybe there is PTSD from this experience, but it’s like, there was trauma for sure … It was just crazy. Literally, it was like searching through the wreckage, trying to see who’s here physically in the office and who is actually still online on Slack.” —Former HR employee
“Even up until the last, I would say, three days, we didn’t actually know exactly how many people; we didn’t know where he was going to cut the line. We didn’t know how many people were going to be let go.” —Former executive
“Even up until the last, I would say, three days… we didn’t know how many people were going to be let go.”
Former executive
Flying blind
“It was like picking up the pieces for a few days because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We didn’t know what the strategic directive was. We didn’t know where we were supposed to focus our energy and our budget … I’m sure some of the leadership had a small sense of that, but none of that trickled down because they probably didn’t have a very clear direction either.” —Former HR employee
“The last two weeks were some of the most unpleasant experiences I think I’ve ever had in my career. I certainly hope I never go through anything like that again. The flow of information just simply stopped.” —Former engineer 1
Chapter 2
Life in the Muskverse
For those who survived the initial wave of mass layoffs, working at Twitter did not get any less hectic. Musk’s famously mercurial nature, his insistence on a “hard-core” work ethos and on cost cutting, and his dreaded “demon mode” seeped into every aspect of the organization. Some saw an opportunity to try to rise through the ranks; others learned the dos and don’ts of working for Musk.
Impressing Elon
“You could already see people being savages, trying to climb up the ladders. That looked like a lot of people literally bootlicking, proposing changes that were very, very unrealistic. You still see that every now and then, but not as often. The first few months, it was crazy.” —X employee 1
“[Musk] sent out an email that was like, ‘We need to find new projects.’ Like, if you have any ideas, send them my way and Elon will evaluate them … Somebody was like, let’s bring back Vine … Somebody wanted to bring back Twitter Music. Just stupid shit. And it was a period where the only thing that was special about it was basically all of the Elon believers who were trying to figure out how to pump their status with him. And so it was the easiest things they could find, like, ‘Oh, well, we have all the Vine videos. Let’s bring Vine back.’” —Former engineer 2
The cult of ‘hard-core’
“I think he doesn’t believe in work-life balance. He himself doesn’t have work-life balance, so why would he?” —Former executive
“I think he doesn’t believe in work-life balance. He himself doesn’t have work-life balance, so why would he?”
Former executive
“Everything has changed. People used to go home at like five or four, whatever. You constantly, constantly see people staying late, especially in S.F.; S.F. people stay as late as their managers, or if Elon’s there and their meeting gets pushed, and they have to stay there. Like, on Wednesdays or Thursdays, a lot of people stay there till nine or 10 or even later. The culture itself has changed drastically. People care more about the work, but they also stress more about it. Whenever you make a change, and it’s not good, you’re like, oh, someone’s gonna get fired over it. You never had that before. You didn’t have to look over your shoulder.
“You just need to work hard and code and be good at coding and solving problems and putting fires out fast. I think that’s what would make someone thrive more … You don’t need people to tell you what to do. If someone tells you what to do, you probably should have already done it.” —X employee 1
Cost cutting
“One of the silver linings to the Elon takeover is I got to see things that I wouldn’t have seen in my day-to-day job previously. And there were a lot of things where it was like, ‘Why are we paying for this technology that no one at the company uses?’ There were clearly a lot of contracts that people had lost track of or weren’t looking at, and that was insightful.
“I do think that Elon arriving caused the company to address a lot of skeletons that were in the closet that I don’t think they would have addressed otherwise.” —Former HR employee
“I do think that Elon arriving caused the company to address a lot of skeletons that were in the closet that I don’t think they would have addressed otherwise.”
Former HR employee
Demon mode
“Never go against his word. People rarely try to contradict him. And if he asks something you don’t know, don’t make shit up. Just say you don’t know, but you will find out next time you talk to him or send it over an email, but never try to bullshit your way out of a question.” —X employee 1
“At a certain point, I just sort of sat on the phone and listened to that rant. And what was really interesting to me was how in that moment, his justification for his anger and his outrage was talking about how Twitter was important for the future of humanity … I saw in that moment that he didn’t view this as a business question or as a policy question or as a strategy question, but as a moral question, and in his moral universe, anything that would undermine Twitter’s success was not a business question but an ethics question, and it rationalized this kind of totally inexplicable unjustifiable behavior, in his mind.” —Yoel Roth
“He really doesn’t like being told what to do. He really doesn’t like to be told that something he thinks is wrong, though he does admit when he’s wrong.” —X employee 1
“He really doesn’t like being told what to do. He really doesn’t like to be told that something he thinks is wrong, though he does admit when he’s wrong.”
X employee 1
“He is a bully himself because he was bullied. He is angry and bitter and resentful and goes out swinging at anybody that punches at him because that’s the only thing he knows, right?” —Former executive
Chapter 3
A new identity
Beginning in May, Musk made some of his biggest moves. Perhaps recognizing the limits of his capabilities, Musk hired NBC executive Linda Yaccarino to serve as CEO and hopefully revive the company’s ad business. He officially killed the Twitter brand, along with its bird logo, and rechristened the platform as X, and he made major product changes such as eliminating headlines on tweets and offering various paid versions of the service.
Enter Linda Yaccarino, your new CEO
“I was very hopeful. I thought she would revive the advertising business we had and would bring more of a regular company environment with more frequent updates … She hasn’t. And I believe the reason for both of those is Elon.” —X employee 1
“The thing that I found interesting was she was obviously an expert in her field, and it was a field that Twitter could use, like having good relationships with advertisers and building media partnerships.
“I don’t really see something—that would be very important—which is a trusted relationship there between her and Elon. At a bare minimum you need that. If you don’t have trust between the person you’re working for, the leader of the company, I don’t see how that can work.” —Former executive
“I don’t really see something—that would be very important—which is a trusted relationship there between [Linda Yaccarino] and Elon.”
Former executive
“[Linda Yaccarino has] sent, like, three emails. And they’ve all been very random, and she sounds like a bot honestly … I don’t know how she’s doing for the other side, but for engineers, she’s not really there.” —X employee 1
Identity change: From Twitter to X
“We absolutely avoid saying Twitter or calling them tweets in meetings with him. But I mean, old habits die hard. People still call them tweets. Maybe not Twitter, but people still call them tweets for sure … a lot of people just do it out of old habit. Because at the end of the day, internally, everything’s still called Twitter, tweets, retweets. It’s just the outside stuff that’s been renamed, but it would be impossible to rename everything internally correctly.” —X employee 1
“For the most part it’s just been treated as another task that is out of our hands. The decision was made to change without letting the entire company know, so we are still in progress updating any and all references to Twitter, tweet, retweet, etc. It’s a large list and continues to grow as we find more.” —X employee 2
“I assume that if you [say “tweets” and “Twitter”] constantly and it sounds like it’s on purpose, [Musk] is gonna say something. But he for sure calls them posts; he does not make that mistake.” —X employee 1
Musk’s product vision
“He’s a futurist. He has a vision of what this thing needs to look like. But the details, how you’re gonna get there, that could be a lot of experimentation and a lot of people figuring out a plan.” —Former executive
“He’s a futurist. He has a vision of what this thing needs to look like. But the details, how you’re gonna get there, that could be a lot of experimentation and a lot of people figuring out a plan.”
Former executive
“We haven’t really done anything to accelerate growth. We have a full team for that. But right now, we’re really not doing anything to attract new customers. We’re pretty much just working with what we have and crossing our fingers that people are signing up. I think it’s just because he’s building the app for himself.
“[Musk] talks a lot about YouTube. He basically says look at YouTube, and that’s what we should have for video. That’s his most talked-about company. Like, whenever we propose anything video-related, he’s like, look at YouTube.” —X employee 1
The future
“I don’t know about the everything app. But I do know that the product we have now—it’s good. We could use more engineers. If we had more engineers, it would be amazing the things that we would be able to do, but it’s still very impressive what we’re able to achieve with the number of people that we have. The things that we’ve done this year would have taken old Twitter multiple years … Something that would have taken at least six months before, we just did in a week or two.” —X employee 1
“There is little to no strong belief in the Elon plan from what I have experienced thus far. The exception being those who have been elevated/promoted or seem to have a vested interest in rising within the ranks internally.” —X employee 2
“I think it will either be a very successful Elon company, with usual Elon-company problems, or it’ll eventually be sold off … The only way it would go bankrupt is if it benefited him to buy it cheaper.” —X employee 1
