Tears, blunders and chaos: inside Elon Musk’s Twitter

In the three months since Musk bought Twitter for 44bn, thousands have been sacked and the company has nosedived. Here, staff tell of a firm in disarray and an owner whose reputation is also plummeting

In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company's largest shareholder, and was offered a seat on the board. Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch when it comes to growing the companies he's helped lead," he wrote on the workplace messaging platform Slack.

Twitter had been defined by the leadership of Jack Dorsey - a co-founder who was known for going on long meditation retreats, fasting 22 hours a day, and walking five miles to the office - who was seen by some as an absentee landlord, leaving Twitter's strategy and daily operations to a handful of trusted deputies. To Simon and those like him, it was hard to see Twitter as anything other than wasted potential.