Remember Esther Crawford? There was a time when X was called Twitter (who are we kidding; it will always be Twitter) and she is the former Twitter Blue lead, who became the centre of attention after posting the “sleeping bag” photo. Crawford hasn’t minced words about working for Elon Musk in a 15-minute video via Twitter.
Crawford joined Twitter after it acquired her startup, Squad, in 2020. She was having one of the best phases of her career until Musk became the owner of the platform. Even after that she was willing to go the distance and put in her best but Musk kept pushing her and every other employee.
“I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all,” she said about life in the Musk regime. No, we are not trying to deliberately make Musk sound like a dictator.
“I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead, he’d poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it,” said Crawford.
After Musk took control, he wanted to change the company immediately. First, he sacked a large number of people and then he wanted to make the remaining employees fill in for the vacant spots. One of the areas of concern was Twitter Blue. Since he needed money, he overhauled Twitter Blue and then added compulsory payment for getting the Blue tick.
The famous "sleeping bag" photo from her Twitter days
Crawford had to work long hours and she had tweeted a photo of her resting in a sleeping bag in the office. “Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family.
“Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many time zones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun,” she said.
The problem with Musk at the moment is that he is surrounded by people who won’t criticise him even if wrong decisions get taken.
“Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex,” she said in the video.