Sleeping in office does not save your job, Twitter’s top executive finds

Senior executive Esther Crawford has been fired from Twitter – despite famously sleeping on the office floor to meet Elon Musk’s deadlines.

Crawford’s dedication to her job did not spare her from the company’s latest round of layoffs, according to a tweet by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer.

Crawford was one of the executives in charge of the Twitter Blue subscription service launched after Musk’s takeover of the company.

She caused some controversy in November when she posted a picture of herself sleeping on the office floor at work, just days after Twitter changed hands.

“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines, sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she tweeted at the time.

Some Twitter users now point out her loyalty was misguided. Uju Anya, an outspoken professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, said Crawford was “tossed out like dirty bath water.”

“Don’t know who needs to hear this, but live for yourself and not any institution,” tweeted Anya, who has previously described herself as “very vocally left-leaning” and showed support for unionization efforts at Amazon.

Crawford pushed back against criticism, tweeting: “The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer and mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena.”

Other Musk loyalists were fired over the weekend, including Martijn de Kuijper, a senior product manager at Twitter and founder of Revue, a newsletter tool acquired by the social media platform in 2021 and shut down by it last month.

“Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over,” de Kuijper tweeted.

Twitter laid off at least 200 people over the weekend – or about 10% of its current workforce – according to a report by the New York Times.

The layoffs impacted product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, the report said, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Twitter’s monetization infrastructure team was reduced from 30 to fewer than eight people, it said.

The social platform’s workforce is now believed to be under 2,000 employees, down from 7,500 in October when Musk acquired the company in a deal valued at $44 billion.

In November, Musk said Twitter was experiencing a “massive revenue drop” as top advertisers slashed their spending on the platform amid concerns over its moderation policies.