In November 2022, shortly after Elon Musk had acquired Twitter and wanted to do away with the existing blue check system, Esther Crawford posted what she later described as a “cheeky” photo of herself sleeping at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, California.
“When our teams are working around the clock to meet a deadline, we sometimes #SleepWhereYouWork,” Crawford, who was director of product management at the time, wrote.
The photo went viral and, for better or worse, became emblematic of the workplace culture and chaos that has swept across Twitter under its new president.
“I love my family and am grateful that they understand that sometimes you have to work hard and hustle to achieve results. Building something new at the scale of Twitter is extremely hard. I am blessed to get to do this work with some of the best people in tech,” Crawford wrote on Twitter after receiving criticism for the photo.
But behind the scenes, Twitter’s directors worried that employees would burn out under Musk’s demands and the pressure of tight deadlines.
Moreover, the photo was staged.
Leading your team to death
According to an excerpt from “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” a forthcoming book about Musk’s sprawling acquisition of Twitter, written by New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mack, Crawford expressed concern to Musk about pressure from his team to revamp Twitter Blue into a service that hands out blue checks to users who pay $8 a month. Previously, the checks were used to identify celebrities, government agencies and other high-profile users who are vulnerable to impersonation. The old Twitter Blue offered users more features, including the ability to edit tweets.
Three sources familiar with the conversation between Crawford and Musk told The Times reporter that Twitter’s director had been given 10 days to relaunch Blue.
The pressure was clearly taking its toll on some of the team members.
According to the excerpt, some Blue employees have begun using their Apple Watch to monitor their elevated heart rates and share the data with coworkers as a light-hearted joke.
At one point, Crawford, who had to devise a careful tactic to approach Musk, told his new boss that he didn’t want to leave his team to die.
“I don’t want the team to die over this,” Crawford told Musk, according to the excerpt.
“Well, push it to the brink of death,” Musk said with a laugh.
Crawford and a spokesperson for X did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk’s loyal employees
Crawford joined Twitter in 2020 and remained there until Musk’s acquisition, when he was fired.
It’s unclear why Crawford was fired, despite being one of Musk’s most loyal employees. The director was among at least 50 team members who were laid off in February 2023. The company was renamed X in July 2023.
The former director said on social media that she embraced Musk’s hustle culture and that before he joined, “Twitter often felt like a place of wasted potential,” but she also said Musk had trapped himself in an “echo chamber” by surrounding himself with “yes men.”
According to the book, Crawford would bring a sleeping bag and eye mask to the office for naps, and a colleague even photographed her asleep at work.
Later, after a long shift with the team, Crawford and her colleagues decided to take another photo of her in the sleeping bag, this time staged.
The tweet of this staged photo quickly spread online, drawing both praise and criticism.
According to the book, the colleague who took the photo wanted to delete the post, but Crawford insisted that it remain up.
“We are #OneTeam and we show it with the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWork, so I retweeted with #SleepWhereYouWork – a dig at fellow Twitter users,” Crawford wrote at the time. “We’ve been in the middle of a crazy public offering acquisition for months, but we continue to move forward. I’m so proud of our strength and resilience.”
Crawford announced his joining Meta in April, praising CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “vision and ambition.” Crawford will take on the role of director of product management at Meta, a similar role he held at Twitter.
“Seeing how Zuckerberg has made the company more efficient and less bureaucratic over the past year makes me even more open to joining now because I want to move quickly and ship a great product,” Crawford said.
