Twitter Sees Three More Executive Departures

Twitter has lost more senior personnel amid the turmoil caused by Elon Musk and his $44 billion takeover attempt of the microblogging platform.

Musk placed the deal on hold last week over concerns about Twitter’s estimate of the number of automated bots on the service.

Musk has been a vocal critic of Twitter, and his bid is creating a lot of instability for the firm. Indeed its share price has plummeted in recent weeks, wiping out all the gains it made  from when Musk first disclosed his stake in the platform.

Troubled times

Twitter employees are thus in a state of limbo, as the San Francisco-based company waits for Musk to finalise his takeover.

And CEO Parag Agrawal last month was unable to provide worried staff members with much reassurance at a town hall meeting.

Agrawal said there was no planned layoff, but he admitted the future of the social media firm is uncertain.

Matters have not been helped when Elon Musk engaged with a number of tweets that were openly critical of Twitter senior management – which earned him a rebuke from the platform’s former CEO Dick Costolo.

And then last week Elon Musk said he would reserve the platform’s “stupid” ban on former President Donald Trump.

Hiring freeze

As Musk clashes with Twitter’s board of directors over its filing that fewer than 5 percent of its monetisable daily active users during the first quarter were fake or spam accounts (Musk believes the true figure is much higher), there have been a number of internal issues for the firm.

The platform has reportedly imposed a hiring freeze, except for business critical roles.

And then last week it emerged that CEO Agrawal had dismissed two senior executives, namely Kayvon Beykpour, who used to led Twitter’s consumer division; and Bruce Falck, who oversaw revenue.

Both men confirmed on Twitter that their departures were not their decision.

More departures

Now Bloomberg News has reported that Twitter has lost three more senior employees.

The latest personnel to go are Ilya Brown, VP of product management; Katrina Lane, VP of Twitter Service; and Max Schmeiser, head of data science.

All three chose to exit on their own, according to the memos.

“We are thankful for all of their hard work and leadership,” a Twitter spokesperson told Bloomberg via email. “We continue to be focused on providing the very best experience to the people on Twitter.”