'I don't want to work with these clowns.' Inside the culture war that Elon Musk has unleashed at Twitter.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a current Twitter employee. Though the employee asked to remain anonymous due to contractual obligations, their identity is known to Insider.

One of Twitter's core values is — or was — transparency. All of our calendars were open. You could look at our former head of engineering's calendar and see where he was having lunch that day. Documents were usually open and viewable. With a project, you could see who initiated the work, who was the assignee, who was in the chain of command.

That's all gone now. I can't find the information that I need to see about the projects that I'm working on. Documents are locked. Permissions are closed. I'll click on a project that I'm supposed to help out with in a Slack channel and find out that I'm blocked from seeing it. Before Elon Musk took over on Oct. 27, that would have been very unusual.

I did not come to Twitter for the money. The pay was substantially less than I could have made at other tech companies. I joined because I cared about the mission, once upon a time. The mission was to serve the public conversation. The people who work here really used to care about the product. They wanted to make Twitter a place to exchange ideas and observations that were funny, factual and engaging. The employees could have easily gone elsewhere and made more money. But they stayed because they believed in the mission, and they did their best. That brought me a lot of delight and joy.

Whenever I'm on Twitter, I always find something that makes me laugh, or learn something. I don't engage. And that's one of Twitter's problems, engagement. And those who do engage often get harassed. The content moderation is a work in progress. But striving to be safe and secure for everyone really matters. Or at least it did matter. I don't know if it will anymore. I'm very concerned for the future of the platform. I think problems of safety and harassment will get worse before they get better.

If Donald Trump is allowed back on the platform I'd be very, very scared about what's to come, particularly around the 2024 election.

Up until all of the drama around the sale, I genuinely saw these values alive inside of the company. There was genuine transparency. Communication was open. People at the bottom knew what was happening at the top. It was a document-heavy culture. You could go in and read about anything that anyone in the company was working on at any point in time. There was a staff hierarchy to be sure, but the culture was quite democratic. Now, people outside the company know more about what's happening at Twitter than we do.

We had very robust Slack channels where employees talked freely. It was almost like a social water cooler. People would joke around and be vocal about their views on this whole situation, for months. Now, these channels are still active but the anti-Elon sentiment is almost gone. There's a lot of internal censorship. For example, there was this amazing engineer, Manu Cornet, who would make cartoons called Twittoons. He was critical. He'd make Parag look like a pushover and Elon look like an idiot. Manu was fired this week. The hypothesis is that he was fired for cause, for not spending all of his waking hours engineering. I would say that's a form of internal censorship. Other known critics have been axed as well. If you're leading a revolution, the first thing you're supposed to do is guillotine the aristocracy. It feels like that's what's happening.

Purges and factions

As of this week, the senior leadership are all gone. The old C-suite is gone. The heads of Redbird (engineering), Bluebird (product), and Goldbird (revenue) have all been axed. Now, it appears Elon has brought in his men from Boring Company and Tesla to run the show. David O. Sacks and Jason Calacanis are prowling the office. You can see them in Birdhouse, our staff directory. They're listed there as software engineers.

It's almost like I am in mourning. Up until last week, I was under the impression that most people inside the company felt the same way that I did. For the most part, I still am. But on Blind, it's been nuts to me to see this small faction of newly-minted Elon acolytes suddenly rise up and try to make their voices heard. The amount of ass-kissing and the amount of bizarre Reddit, 4-chan-style stuff like "oh Elon, I'll be your right hand" on Blind, during those first days after the transaction closed — it was terrifying. I thought, 'I don't want to work with these clowns.' Now, those pro-Elon voices have virtually disappeared from Blind. I have no idea what's going on. Are the Elon loyalists still out there? I don't think this group is in the majority, at least not yet. But I'm concerned that the next generation of people building Twitter won't believe in the core of our mission. They'll believe in Elon Musk.

No one is telling us what Elon is actually like, but people seem obsessed with his celebrity. A lot of people seem tickled by the fact that this very famous person is in their presence.

Elon has talked about banning bots from Twitter. I think that's very, very dumb. For example, there's that account that tracks the comings and goings of Russian oligarchs' jets. I think that's great. That's an example of useful public information. And that's also an example of a bot. Tons of crucial information gets posted anonymously.

Twitter shouldn't be a for-profit company. It should be something more like a protocol. One person shouldn't have the power to set the limits and the tone of the public conversation. What's even more frightening is that I don't see any viable alternatives to Twitter right now. People talk about Mastodon, but I'm skeptical. No other platform has the same use and the same network effects. I don't know where people will go.

It's been such a strange transition. My life, my lived experience, has been mostly normal for the past week. I keep on working as if nothing has changed. The one difference has been the San Francisco Slack channel. There are a lot of people asking how late the garage is open. People are staying much, much later than normal. That's all Elon. These are mostly engineers. When they're asked to jump, they'll say 'how high?' They want to impress this guy, to make a good impression. Last week, when he started dictating orders and setting deadlines, it was a test. How agile are these developers? How fast are these engineers? They worked around the clock to deliver all of the features he wanted. They've been there ever since, working entire weekends, sleeping there. Someone took a picture of someone in a sleeping bag on a conference-room floor.

I've heard stories of people being asked to work literally around the clock. Engineers are being asked to stay on call over the weekend and then being called and asked to do things immediately, at three or four in the morning.

That has Elon's stamp all over it. It's psychologically unsafe. This is not Twitter's culture.

I can't keep doing this. I've started interviewing elsewhere.

Twitter did not reply to Insider's query based on the employee's account.

Mattathias Schwartz is a senior correspondent at Insider.