Twitter employees grill CEO Parag Agrawal over fears of post-Musk exodus

theguardian.com:

Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, sought to quell employee anger on Friday during a company-wide meeting where employees demanded answers to how managers planned to handle an anticipated mass exodus prompted by Elon Musk.

The meeting comes after Musk, the Tesla chief executive who sealed a $44bn deal to buy the social media company, repeatedly criticized Twitter’s content moderation practices and a top executive responsible for setting speech and safety policies.

At the internal town hall meeting, executives said the company would monitor staff attrition daily, but it was too soon to tell how the buyout deal with Musk would affect staff retention.

Musk has pitched lenders on slashing board and executive salaries but exact cost cuts remain unclear, according to sources familiar with the matter. One source said Musk would not make decisions on job cuts until he assumed ownership of Twitter.

“I’m tired of hearing about shareholder value and fiduciary duty. What are your honest thoughts about the very high likelihood that many employees will not have jobs after the deal closes?” one Twitter employee asked Agrawal, in a question read aloud during the meeting.

Agrawal answered that Twitter had always cared about its employees and would continue to do so.

“I believe the future Twitter organization will continue to care about its impact on the world and its customers,” he said.

Executives said during the meeting that the employee attrition rate had not changed compared to the levels before the news of Musk’s interest in buying the company.

In recent days, Musk has tweeted criticism of Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, a Twitter veteran widely respected across Silicon Valley and internally known as Twitter’s “moral authority”.

O