Crawford has attempted to put a positive spin on being laid off.
One of Elon Musk’s most loyal workers, who went viral for sleeping on the Twitter office floor as she raced to meet deadlines, has now been fired.
Head of Twitter payments Esther Crawford is believed to be among roughly 10% of the staff fired from the social media giant in yet another round of job cuts since the billionaire’s takeover of the platform in October of last year, The Independent reports.
The New York Times says that Twitter has laid off around 200 employees. These include product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability.
Since some people are losing their minds I'll explain: doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc). I have teammates around the world who are putting in the effort to bring something new to life so it's important to me to show up for them & keep the team unblocked.
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
Crawford went viral in November after pictures circulated on social media showing her sleeping on the office floor. She wrote at the time: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines, sometimes you sleep where you work.”
Her post, which came amid a wave of layoffs as Musk rushed to turn the company around, led to claims of a toxic work culture at Twitter.
However, in a later tweet, Crawford defended her actions and attempted to provide some context, saying “doing hard things requires sacrifice”.
Following Elon’s takeover, reports suggest that Crawford began “angling for a bigger role”. Instead, she was laid off.
She was one of the executives in charge of Twitter Blue, the site’s subscription service.
In a tweet posted over the weekend, Crawford once again defended herself, stating that she was “deeply proud” of her team.
“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,” she wrote.
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 & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. 💙
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
Reportedly, some employees learned about their layoffs through email, though others said they realised they were fired after discovering that they could no longer log in to the company’s internal system.
The latest wave of Twitter layoffs comes after mass layoffs in November when around 3,700 employees were sacked.
