Ex-Twitter employee reveals Elon Musk's quirks at work: Repeats jokes, 'oddly charming'

Elon Musk's focus on speed is "incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up", Esther Crawford said.

Esther Crawford shot to internet fame last November when a photo of her sleeping on the floor at the Twitter office was viral, soon after Elon Musk took over the social media giant. A former product manager at the company, she was not spared by Musk his February layoffs.

Five months on, she has shared what it was like working closely with Musk and how the billionaire’s eccentricities made Twitter employees nervous about being around him.

The pre-Elon Musk Twitter, or Twitter 1.0, was “amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life”, she said.

“Dumb power plays, reorganisations and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly.” Calling the working the company bureaucratic, she said it was time-consuming to implement new processes due to the sheer levels of approvals needed.

“You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician,” Esther Crawford wrote in her 2,000-plus word post on Twitter.

Finally, in late 2022, when Musk took over Twitter, Crawford said she was “cautiously optimistic”. She listed three reasons for staying back at the company despite many of her colleagues quitting in protest of Musk’s working style. The reasons were optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money, she said.

Crawford was criticised on social media for staying back at Twitter after the mass layoffs in November 2022 and actively supporting the Tesla chief’s plan’s for the company.

So what was it like working with Elon Musk? “In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over,” she wrote, adding that the challenge employees faced was that he could turn from an excited boss to an angry person in a second.

“Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.”

Musk’s inner circle at Twitter was “too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said”, Crawford said.

Musk fired Twitter’s Indian-origin chief executive officer Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal policy head Vijaya Gadde last October after his $44 billion takeover of the company. Soon after that, he laid off nearly half of Twitter's workforce in sweeping changes that have alienated investors and antagonised employees. He carried out another round of layoffs in February this year.