- A former exec at X, previously Twitter, says Elon Musk was at times more impulsive than she expected.
- Ella Irwin told NBC News there was “more emotion behind his decisions” than she anticipated.
- Musk’s biographer has noted he has a “dark streak.” Musk’s ex, Grimes, calls it “demon mode.”
A former exec at X, previously known as Twitter, says there was at least one element of working with owner Elon Musk that surprised her.
Ella Irwin, previously the head of trust and safety at X, said Musk excelled at “questioning everything, boiling things down to first principles, removing constraints” but found there was “more emotion behind his decisions than I would have maybe expected before I met him,” she told NBC News in an article published Friday.
“I think that contributes to some of the impulsiveness,” she added. “I think there were a lot of situations in which I would have handled things very differently. There were things that I wouldn’t have tweeted in the middle of the night, there were certainly things that could have been stated better.”
Irwin is the latest former X manager to speak publicly about her time under Musk
Irwin isn’t the only person to say as much about the world’s richest man.
When asked to give X CEO Linda Yaccarino advice about working with Musk, Yoel Roth, Irwin’s predecessor, said, “You should be worried. I wish I had been more worried.”
Roth has said he’s received death threats and was forced to flee his home following the release of the Twitter Files and Musk’s comments misrepresenting Roth’s former academic writings.
Esther Crawford, Musk’s former lieutenant at Twitter who went viral for sleeping on the floor at the company’s headquarters, said she’d “made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0, and that meant I could be fired at any moment and for no reason at all.”
“Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him,” Crawford said.
Musk’s biographer says he has a ‘dark streak’
Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, wrote that the billionaire loved “impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach” ideas, recalling an incident last Christmas Eve when Musk had his private jet diverted to go move X servers himself, cutting cables with a pocket knife, after employees told him they needed more time.
Musk’s decision, however, caused tech glitches for the company, including delays and repeated app crashes during Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces.
Isaacson also wrote that Musk had a “dark streak” and could be ruthless with employees at his companies, which include X, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI.
“He’d go dark and I’d know that he was just going to rip that person apart,” he wrote. “The thing that I noticed is that once he finishes doing it — and it was never physical and it was almost done in a flat monotone — but he would just really attack people and then a few days later, if they absorbed the lesson, he’d forget about it. It would be as if he went from becoming Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and then didn’t even think that much or remember that much of how tough he had been on people.”
Musk’s ex, Grimes, referred to these rages as Musk flying into “demon mode,” which she said made him “unpleasant” to be around but allowed him to “get shit done.”
“Elon is very good at questioning everything, boiling things down to first principles, removing constraints, and that can be very powerful when you need to drive a lot of change very quickly,” she said.
Musk has been accused of screaming at executives, including Tesla cofounder Martin Eberhard, and of rage-firing employees. Musk has denied ever rage-firing staffers, saying in 2021 that he “gives clear and frank feedback which may be construed as derision.”
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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