While other Twitter employees reacted with horror to new owner Elon Musk after the takeover, Esther Crawford went “all in”. She defends Musk against criticism and demonstratively sleeps in the office. Everything points to a steep climb for the product manager. But now it’s over for Crawford too.
Esther Crawford was Elon Musk’s star student on Twitter. But now the second richest person in the world has also fired the product director, who defended him for months against all criticism and, like no other, had publicly demonstrated her willingness to meet Musk’s demands for “hardcore” work without regard to private life. According to several US media specializing in the tech industry, Crawford fell victim to the recent wave of layoffs on Twitter along with around 50 other colleagues from various areas of the company.
Immediately after taking over Twitter, Musk fired thousands of employees in a chaotic process in the fall. A storm of indignation broke out among those who had been released and those who remained. Also publicly, for example on Twitter, Musk had to listen to heavy criticism not only of the layoffs, but also of his professional decisions, for example on software development. Some critics who still had their jobs after the first round of terminations lost them as a result. Overall, the Twitter workforce shrank from around 7,500 to currently around 2,000 people.
Esther Crawford stood out during this period. In November, a tweet of hers went viral with a photo of her lying on a mat between desks in the office, wearing a sleeping bag and sleeping mask. “When your team is working 24/7 to meet deadlines, sometimes you sleep where you work,” Crawford wrote. She defended Musk in the face of the chaotic mass layoffs. She wrote on Twitter that she was heartbroken that “so many good people” would have to go, “but the business is not profitable and drastic cuts would have been necessary to survive, no matter who owns the company”.
This strategy for dealing with the crisis at Twitter was not well received by some colleagues. The Financial Times quoted a senior executive as saying that Crawford was “boot-licking” the new boss. Although she apparently made herself unpopular with the workforce, Crawford was initially successful. Not only did she endure several rounds of firings, but she got the attention of the boss himself. Musk reportedly met with her in person. The Financial Times report states that Crawford has taken on a kind of intermediary role between the CEO and the product team.
Among other things, Crawford was responsible for the payment model Twitter Blue and also for the planned payment function of the Twitter app. In addition to the drastic austerity measures, it is features like these that Musk believes should make Twitter profitable. Twitter Blue has fewer than 300,000 paid subscribers to date. That shouldn’t be nearly enough to compensate for the collapse in advertising revenue after Musk’s takeover.
It is not known whether Musk was unhappy with Crawford’s performance. After the most recent round of layoffs, there are hardly any product managers left in management positions from the pre-Musk days at Twitter. According to reports, the new owner wants a complete fresh start in the area, and almost all employees are to be replaced – whether loyal or critical.
While comments on social media have mocked Crawford for being kicked out, the manager has no regrets. At least that’s what she writes in a kind of statement on Twitter. She went “all in” on “Twitter 2.0”. To see that as a mistake is the worst lesson that can be learned now. She was “deeply proud of the team for what they accomplished despite so much noise and chaos.”
