Twitter's ex-VP says working with Elon Musk was the 'hardest experience' of her career

Ella Irwin, the former head of trust and safety for Twitter (now X), has said that working with Elon Musk was the "hardest experience" of her career. The senior executive, who has worked in similar roles at Google and Amazon, revealed that she and the X owner often differed when it came to handling fake news and freedom of speech.

The 48-year-old had been in the company for a year before she resigned following Musk's public criticism of moderation actions at X around the issue of misgendering.

“It absolutely was the hardest experience that I’ve gone through in my career,” Irwin said in an interview with NBC News while narrating the nature of her work under Musk's leadership. She added that she quit because it had become clear to her that “there was no longer alignment” between X and her “nonnegotiable principles.”

“One was this notion of freedom of speech versus freedom of reach,” she told the media house. “It was important to me that there was an understanding that hate speech, for example, violent graphic content, things like that, were not promoted, advertised, amplified.”