SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin called working for Elon Musk the “hardest experience” of her career in an interview with NBC News on Friday.
Irwin was the second person to hold that role and quit since Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter, now X, a year ago.
She joined Twitter a month after Musk’s takeover in November 2022 but lasted just seven months in the company. She resigned in June 2023, citing irreconcilable differences between her principles and those of Musk’s vision for the platform.
Irwin reflects on experience at Twitter
In her first interview since her abrupt resignation from the post, Irwin provided unforeseen insight into why she left and questioned what she called a series of “terrible” decisions by the billionaire that she says have made the company worse.
“It absolutely was the hardest experience that I've gone through in my career,” Irwin, who has previously worked at firms like Amazon and Google, told NBC News.
The 48-year-old described Musk to be excellent at “questioning everything” but said he was more driven by emotions than business acumen.
“There's more emotion behind his decisions than I would have maybe expected before I met him,” explained Irwin, who has spent decades working in companies like JPMorgan and Bank of America in her career.
“I think that contributes to some of the impulsiveness,” she continued. “I think there were a lot of situations in which I would have handled things very differently.”
Hinting at the series of inconsequential polls and seemingly slipshod decisions made by the CEO over the past year, she said, “There were things that I wouldn't have tweeted in the middle of the night, [and] there were certainly things that could have been stated better.”
The industry veteran recalled how Elon at first came into the company with “startup energy” but ultimately fell into the trap of engaging in mass layoffs just weeks into his takeover.
Referring to the layoffs that saw the firm lose half of its then-12,000-strong workforce as a cost-cutting measure, Irwin said, “I don't think I've ever seen anything like that.”
Musk's problematic, impulse-driven decisions
Irwin’s arrival at Twitter was marked by the dissolution of its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of roughly 100 civil, human rights, and other organizations the firm had formed to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, and posts promoting self-harm on the site.
Irwin recalled having realized at the time how these decisions could turn out to be problematic and helped her reaffirm her already aired conclusion that “there was no longer alignment” between the firm now known as X and the “non-negotiable principles” she's built her career on over the years.
Among some of the impulse-driven decisions were the issues of misgendering on the platform, posts that purposely used the wrong pronouns for transgender individuals and “this notion of freedom of speech versus freedom of reach,” she stated.
“It was important to me that there was an understanding that hate speech, for example, violent graphic content, things like that, were not promoted, advertised, amplified,” Irwin emphasized.
Another issue with Musk's ownership, she explained, was his so-called mission to give precedence to “user choice,” a decision she believes has come back to bite him as misinformation and terrorist content pertaining to the Israel-Hamas war continues to make rounds.
“I'm a big believer in giving people the ability to make the decisions that are right for them,” claimed Ella. “Who they want to follow, what they don't want to see, they should be able to create and choose their own adventure.'
Irwin said the current phenomenon of misinformation is “extremely upsetting,” as the company she quit now faces an active investigation from the European Commission on the matter.
She further added, “I think about the damage that misinformation at scale can do to the product experience, the customer experience, to society."
“It's one of the most important problems we need to solve for,” she said.
Irwin also reflected on what could solve the platform's current woes. “It can't be your one solution - it's one of a whole toolbox of things that needs to happen,” she said.
She also conceded that Musk, despite cutting costs dramatically at the Silicon Valley company, is very good at questioning everything and boiling things down to first principles, while trying to remove constraints.
“That can be very powerful when you need to drive a lot of change very quickly,” she noted.
Twitter's free-speech conundrum
Irwin went on to detail what was the final straw that led to her leaving the company in June.
Musk allegedly floated the idea to eliminate the ability to block videos on the site, which was pulled two months after her resignation in August.
At the time, Musk had been accused of disregarding free speech for backtracking on a deal to air a Daily Wire-funded film over claims it “misgendered” trans people - claims the CEO later shot down by calling the decision a “mistake” made by his staffers.
“This was a mistake by many people at Twitter,” Musk wrote of the Matt Walsh-directed ‘What Is A Woman’, which moderators in June said contained two scenes categorized as “hateful conduct” that went against the site's terms of service.
Musk, at the time, disagreed with his staffers' assessment, writing, “Whether or not you agree with using someone's preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.”
The next day, Musk shared the documentary himself and said he had removed any restrictions on the video.
Within hours, media outlets started reporting that Irwin was leaving.
She told NBC of the decision: “I don't want to have a negative experience every time I log into Twitter.”
Four months later, she still stands by her decision.
She expanded on it by saying, “I've worked every day since I was 14 years old, and with the exception of a few short vacations a year, I haven't really ever had a real break even between jobs, so I wanted to give myself this time. Having said that, I have been talking to a few companies recently.”
She did, however, say she would likely never return to X but would not completely rule out such a possibility.
Irwin told the outlet, “You never say never, right? But I think there would have to be a lot of things that would have to change.”
“Companies change, leadership teams change, a lot of things happen — but I don't know that that would happen anytime soon.”
Never-ending woes for X
Twitter laid off more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure after Musk acquired the company in October 2022.
The company has already been sued for allegedly failing to pay severance. The cases involve breach of contract claims but the company maintains it has paid its ex-employees in full.
The lawsuit, meanwhile - the latest in a series of legal actions against Twitter - claims layoffs affected around 6,000 individuals.
The company is also facing a series of other lawsuits stemming from another round of layoffs that began last year, including claims that it targeted women and workers with disabilities.
Twitter has denied wrongdoing in the cases in which it has filed responses.
It is now facing an investigation in Europe concerning recently circulated misinformation.
