Twitter CEO Elon Musk is being accompanied by at least two bodyguards, who will go as far as to follow him to the bathroom, an unnamed Twitter engineer told the BBC — a sign, seemingly, that the billionaire has little trust in the workers he’s surrounded by.
“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards — very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards,” the source said. “Even when [he goes] to the restroom.”
Twitter insiders told the broadcaster that the platform is no longer capable of protecting individual users from disinformation, child sexual exploitation (CSE) content, or trolling.
Meanwhile, Musk has taken to Twitter to mock the report, arguing that “trolls are kinda fun,” while sarcastically apologizing for turning the platform “from nurturing paradise into place that has… trolls.”
That kind of reaction isn’t exactly surprising. After all, Musk is one of the biggest trolls on the internet today, a position he’s historically used to spread unfounded conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Musk has clearly turned Twitter into his own personal plaything. In a 2am livestream earlier this month, Musk spent 11 minutes testing a “new mic” with fart and rooster noises.
The billionaire also reportedly forced engineers to make his tweets appear at the top of users’ feeds, a seemingly low-brow effort to draw more attention to his utterings.
While Twitter has always had a thorny trolling and abuse problem, the situation has gotten considerably worse after Musk took over, according to recent accounts.
Former employees, who spoke with the BBC confirmed that under Musk’s leadership, many of the systems that were in place or still in the works to reduce the amount of harmful content have been abandoned.
“There’s no one there to work on that at this time,” Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter’s former head of content design, told the broadcaster, referring to a “nudge” system that was designed to reduce the number of abusive replies.
The BBC‘s reporting also revealed that operations at Twitter are still very much in utter chaos, from Musk’s distrusting micromanagement style to the lack of cleaning staff.
“When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working,” a source told the broadcaster. “All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.”
And with new employees in place, who haven’t been briefed and doing jobs that “used to be done by more than 20 people,” there’s “room for much more risk, many more possibilities of things that can go wrong.”
In short, Twitter’s operations are in freefall right now, and the cracks are starting to show, as evidenced by a rising number of outages worldwide.
The fact that Musk is still wandering the halls with bodyguards is symbolic of the lack of trust he has in the employees of his newly acquired company, throwing even more doubt on the company’s already uncertain future.
While the billionaire is still searching for a new CEO to take over a “flaming dumpster fire rolling down the street,” Musk is choosing to fan the flames — and giving the dumpster a big push.
READ MORE: Twitter insiders: We can’t protect users from trolling under Musk [BBC]
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