The manager who was fired by Musk and started working with Meta: Who is Esther Crawford?

Esther Crawford, who was one of the company's top managers when Elon Musk bought Twitter, announced that she now works for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. Crawford announced his new position on his Instagram account with the post: "I joined the Messenger team at Meta as Product Director."

"Although I considered many great options, Meta was my top choice because I'm obsessed with how people connect with technology," Crawford said in the post. “And no other company has a greater scale of impact in this space than Meta, which connects nearly 4 billion people (half of humanity),” she said.

Could be an indicator of big moves

In addition to praising the “extraordinary quality of people” working at Meta, Crawford said she was impressed by Zuckerberg's “vision and strength.” “Seeing how he has made the company more efficient and less bureaucratic over the past year encourages me to join because I want to move quickly and ship great products,” Crawford said of Zuckerberg.

Crawford's latest career move could be an indicator of the big moves Zuckerberg will make to take on Musk's X. In July, Zuckerberg launched Threads, a text-based app that is Meta's answer to Twitter.

Creator of Twitter Blue

Crawford served as Twitter's director of product management for more than two years before being laid off in February 2023. Crawford has been described as one of Elon Musk's top aides, who took over the company in October 2022. In addition to being in charge of the subscription service Twitter Blue, Crawford made headlines when she publicly espoused Musk's tough work culture.

She slept on the floor of the office

“Sometimes you sleep on the floor while your team is working day and night to meet deadlines,” Crawford tweeted in November 2022, when Twitter shared a photo of herself sleeping in her office. But despite surviving Twitter's first three rounds of layoffs, Crawford was eventually laid off in February 2023 and removed. She finally revealed her thoughts on Musk and her leadership in July of that year.

“Elon is oddly charming and genuinely funny in person,” Crawford wrote in X in July 2023, adding that Musk likes to “tell the same stories and jokes over and over again.” She said Musk can be difficult to deal with because “his personality and demeanor can change from excitement to anger in an instant.”

“Because it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to anything, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him,” Crawford said.