Y Combinator’s Garry Tan Goes to the MatRead more

Art and animation by Clark Miller. Photo of Twitter building by Matthew Keys/Creative Commons.
Art and animation by Clark Miller. Photo of Twitter building by Matthew Keys/Creative Commons.

‘It’s Difficult to Resist’: Surviving Twitter Employees Weigh a Flood of Offers From Rivals


Reasoned one spiteful staffer: “The longer I draw a salary, the more money Elon Musk loses.”

Nov. 9, 2022 1:34 PM PST

Days after Elon Musk fired half of Twitter’s workforce last Friday, one employee who escaped the cuts started receiving LinkedIn messages.

The employee, a veteran engineer, said he received 40 messages from recruiters in the last week, from a variety of companies operating in a range of fields—artificial intelligence and machine learning, crypto, fintech and “even some companies that don’t usually fit the definition of tech.”

The first message came through on November 2, the day a number of key Twitter executives announced their departures, and the deluge hasn’t stopped since. “Having Twitter on your resume is a very, very strong signal for a lot of people,” the employee said. “[Recruiters are] definitely interested, even during all these supposed hiring freezes.”

Musk’s decision to give Twitter a massive haircut was horrible news for those affected—just as it was for the 11,000 Meta Platforms employees fired this week, and the 95,000 others who’ve lost their tech industry jobs in 2022, according to a Layoffs.fyi tally. But it’s manna from heaven for industry recruiters, who are eagerly maneuvering to snap up top talent from the world’s most prominent social media firms.

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