Twitter confirmed the sale of the company to Elon Musk for $44 billion. Since then, staffers at an emergency meeting reportedly fired angry questions at executives including CEO Parag Agrawal. According to Insider, Agrawal was described as looking tired and at times annoyed.
According to Daily Mail, an employee at the meeting described Musk as as anti-gay and anti-transgender. The employee expressed fear that his ownership would hurt efforts to recruit new employees.
“What should we tell the LGTBQ community at recruiting conferences we’re lined up to attend when they ask us why they should come work at Twitter when we just sold ourselves to an open homophobe and transphobe?” the staffer asked Dalana Brand, Twitter’s chief people and diversity officer according to the publication.
However, Brand diplomatically avoided agreeing with these perceptions of Musk.
“I cannot speak to Elon’s personal feelings on these things. I can’t speak to what he’s done in his other companies, in terms of people’s experiences,” she said.
“Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to have a conversation. That may be telling,” she continued.
It is unclear where the criticism of Musk may have rooted from but it may have been his previous mockery of the inclusion of pronouns in Twitter biographies.
Back in 2020, the billionaire poked fun at pronouns by saying they “suck.”
This caused an uproar on Twitter as many Tweeps believed Musk was not showing support to transgender individuals.
He later said he does support transgender individuals but these pronouns are “an esthetic nightmare.”