When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he took his “goons” — as Twitter employees called them — with him.
Those goons were the workers and leaders Musk brought over from his other companies — namely Tesla (TSLA), SpaceX, and Neuralink — to work at Twitter. That included a few dozen of Musk’s most trusted engineers, including Ross Nordeen — now at Musk’s xAI startup — and his cousins, Tesla Autopilot engineer James Musk and Neuralink’s Andrew Musk.
That has been fairly documented, but Character Limit paints a clear picture of how Twitter’s longtime employees felt about Musk’s loyalists.
The so-called goons “meandered through the halls as they awaited instructions, the glares of Twitter workers burning into the back of their necks. Some of them, engineers who came from Musk’s other companies including Tesla and SpaceX, felt awkward invading Twitter, but they knew they served the whims of one man.”
Musk’s cousins, who had been directed to lead the culling of Twitter’s engineers, demanded data from employees’ performance evaluations. Neuralink’s Jared Birchall, according to Character Limit, told an executive that the goons had been considering demanding workers sign a loyalty pledge or otherwise issue an ultimatum for workers.
Twitter employees were later required to complete a survey that, essentially, confirmed they would be loyal to Musk. Employees who had been openly critical of Musk, both in public forums and on company chatrooms, were fired.
