Despite Agreement, Musk Answers Tweets About Staff

Billionaire seems to approve of comments about his future employees
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 27, 2022 4:16 PM CDT
Musk Answers Tweets Critical of Staff Despite Agreement
Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Employees have said they're worried about showing up in Elon Musk's tweets.   (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn)

On Tuesday, Elon Musk agreed to all 95 pages of an agreement spelling out the terms of his purchase of Twitter. By Wednesday, he appeared to be no longer in compliance. A couple of tweets from commentators critical of his future employees drew agreeing responses from the billionaire, the Guardian reports. The agreement says Musk, who has 86 million followers on Twitter, is free to continue posting "so long as such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives." His tweets sparked an onslaught of online criticism of the staff members.

His first tweet was an answer to podcast host Saagar Enjeti, referred to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's legal chief, as the site's "top censorship advocate." The comment was an allusion to Twitter blocking the sharing of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden in 2020. Musk responded with "Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate." Users jumped on Musk's tweet, with some making racist references to Gadde, who was born in India. Musk didn't tag her or mention her name, but his comment was seen by 400,000 users.

On Wednesday, Musk tweeted a meme suggesting "left wing bias" affects Twitter's decisions, per the Washington Post. A tweet by Mike Cernovich critical of Jim Baker, another Twitter lawyer, about work he'd done in the FBI also drew a response from Musk. "Sounds pretty bad," he wrote. Twitter didn't comment on Musk's tweets, but other employees expressed support for Gadde. Lea Kissner, head of privacy engineering, tweeted, "@vijaya, fist bump of empathy." Other staff members have worried, inside and outside the company, that they could be harmed by Musk's tweets. "Twitter is a war zone," he told 60 Minutes in 2018. (More Elon Musk stories.)

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