Former Twitter VP urges companies pull advertising from platform — citing Elon Musk’s 'toxic takeover'

16 November 2022

Twitter's former Vice President of Global Media Katie Jacobs Stanton is urging advertisers to pull their money from the microblogging platform after its new owner Elon Musk announced another massive purge of employees who dared to criticize him.

"In a million years, I never thought I would feel this, let alone Tweet this, but I would not recommend any person work at Twitter nor any brand advertise on Twitter given this toxic takeover," Stanton posted on Wednesday morning.

Stanton's warning followed reporting by Platformer founder Zoë Schiffer, who obtained an email that Musk sent to what remains of Twitter's workforce containing an ominous heads up about the "fork in the road" to which Musk has led the site.

"To build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mens [sic] working long hours at high intensity," Musk wrote. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade. Twitter will be much more engineering driven. Design & product will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.”

According to Schiffer, Musk required "Twitter employees who agreed to click 'yes' on a form in the email," adding that "those who don’t by 5PM Thursday will be let go with 3 months severance."

These developments are the latest in a pattern of frenetic changes imposed by Musk in the wake of his $44 billion takeover of the social media giant last month.

On Monday, for example, Musk got into an argument with Eric Frohnhoefer, a veteran software engineer at Twitter who challenged Musk for apologizing for Twitter's "being super slow in certain countries."

Platformer's Casey Newton noted that Musk "blamed this slowness on 'poorly batched RPCs' — remote process calls — which, as we discussed here Monday, reflects a profound ignorance about how Twitter works. Musk also said he planned to unplug 80 percent of the microservices that power various parts of Twitter, saying they were unnecessary."

Frohnhoefer responded that "I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong." Frohnhoefer then politely tried to explain to Musk why his assessment was flawed. Musk fired Frohnhoefer and then deleted his initial tweet.

On Tuesday, Musk – the richest man on Earth – mocked the individuals whom he has terminated.

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” Musk tweeted. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”

These are not the only shakeups that Musk has implemented. On Sunday, November 6th, comedian Kathy Griffin was banned by Musk for impersonating him, leading to an uproar and a "free Kathy" hashtag. Musk immediately declared that “going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”

Moreover, Musk has spread unfounded conspiracy theories and taken a laissez-faire approach to hateful content under the guise of "free speech."

Musk has also toyed with charging a monthly fee for the coveted "blue checkmark" verification, although there was no accompanying policy proposal to ensure that paying accounts were owned by the people to whom they claim to belong.

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