eBusiness Weekly
Business Insider
Multiple engineers and product team members at Twitter, including Director of Product Management Esther Crawford, have been fired, according to multiple media reports.
Crawford spent over two years at Twitter, according to her LinkedIn, working on projects like Twitter Blue and Spaces.
Her layoff was first reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer on Saturday. The Verge’s Alex Heath confirmed the reporting, along with another round of layoffs that affected multiple teams across the organization, including advertisement and product teams.
The layoffs included at least 50 team members, according to multiple outlets. Insider’s Kali Hays first reported in January that 50 people on Twitter’s product team were set to be let go.
Crawford made headlines in November last year after the rollout of CEO Elon Musk’s hardcore work culture after a photo of her sleeping on the floor of Twitter HQ went viral.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” Crawford wrote.
According to a November report from Financial Times, the move “bothered” some employees at Twitter. One senior staffer told the outlet she was “bootlicking.”
Crawford survived the first rounds of layoffs
In November, Musk began what became a series of layoffs that slashed the headcount at Twitter from 7,500 employees to around 2,000 today. In November, Musk promised there would no longer be layoffs at the company. Despite this promise, the recent layoffs constitute the fourth round.
Crawford, however, survived the first three rounds of layoffs and became one of the faces touting Twitter’s new subscription-based verification system.
Following the first round of layoffs in November, The Verge reported Crawford told employees at Twitter that mass firings were “required” for Twitter to survive, which distanced herself from her colleagues.
“I feel heartbroken that this process has required many good people to leave Twitter, but the business was not profitable and drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company,” Crawford wrote on Slack, according to The Verge.
The Information reported in November that Crawford, among other employees, appeared to be “rising in prominence” in the company after Musk eliminated multiple executive positions in late October.
Unnamed employees at Twitter acknowledged this prominence in the FT report, saying she and Musk began working closely following the takeover.
“She has become a bit of an interpreter between Elon and the product team,” one senior staffer told FT.
Under Crawford, multiple changes to Twitter Blue have been announced including the sunsetting of verified badges for celebrities and public figures, a new US$1,000-per-month verification system for businesses, and a limit to who can use two-factor authentication to protect their accounts.
Twitter Blue currently has fewer than 300,000 subscribers. It is unclear if someone will take over Crawford’s position.
Crawford and Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
