Twitter employees ‘super stressed’ after Elon Musk declines to join company’s board

Musk is not subject to an agreement that would cap his stake in Twitter at about 15 per cent

Some Twitter employees are reportedly “stressed” following the announcement that Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk will not be joining the social media giant’s board of directors.

Twitter announced last week that Mr Musk would be joining its board, a day after disclosing that the Tesla chief took a stake of just under 10 per cent in the social media company.

But the social media giant’s chief executive Parag Agarwal said early Monday that Mr Musk had decided not to join the company’s board after all.

Following the announcement, some Twitter employees are “super stressed,” and “working together to help each other get through the week,” Bloomberg reported.

While the billionaire hasn’t disclosed why he isn’t joining Twitter’s board, the decision coincides with a set of tweets he has now deleted, including one proposing that the company drop ads, which are its main source of revenue, and another transforming the social media giant’s headquarters in San Francisco into a homeless shelter.

The world’s richest man also liked a tweet by a user on the platform which speculated that he “was told to play nice and not speak freely”, as a reason for him not taking up his position on the board.

While the like feature on Twitter can be used for a variety of functions, and Mr Musk did not express any explicit agreement with the post, liking the post means at the least that it would more likely appear in his follower’s feeds.

With Mr Musk not joining the board, he could act more freely and continue to tweet his critiques of Twitter to more than his 80 million followers on the site, without needing to act in the best interests of the company.

Employees shared memes to express the confusion and chaos amid messages of solidarity from others.

Following the announcement on Monday, a Q&A session organised by Mr Agarwal with Mr Musk and the company’s employees was also cancelled.

The Q&A session may have clarified whether Mr Musk was planning to be friendly or hostile with his stake.

“This is going to sound funny but Musk’s immediate chilling effect was something that bothered me significantly,” Rumman Chowdhury, a director on Twitter’s AI research team, tweeted on Monday.

But amid the chaos, many of Mr Musk’s followers on Twitter have followed his lead, being critical of the platform.

“Twitter has a beautiful culture of hilarious constructive criticism, and I saw that go silent because of his minions attacking employees,” Dr Chowdhury, a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, said.

Experts also point out that with Mr Musk not joining the board, he is also not subject to an agreement that would cap his stake at about 15 per cent.

If the billionaire had joined the board, they say he’d have been only one of the many voices in the company’s strategy discussions.

But by turning down this option, he could potentially build a bigger stake – one in which he might try to take over the company or help elect directors who are more aligned with his thinking.

“That 15% is an arbitrary number. It’s not like if you own 15%, you can or can’t do something else,” Harry Kraemer, clinical professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and former chairman and CEO of Baxter International, told Associated Press.

“I’m speculating, but maybe the thought was: If we bring him on as a director, and he can’t buy more than 15%, that literally stops him from taking control of the company,” Mr Kraemer said.