Twitter's morale cratered under Dorsey and Agrawal — before Musk ever arrived

On 2022-10-28, the day Elon Musk's $44B acquisition closed and he fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, Platformer's reporting via The Verge showed Twitter's morale crisis long predated him. Internal satisfaction surveys from 2019 to 2022, shared with Platformer along with interviews, documented a company suffering from a leadership vacuum under Jack Dorsey and then Agrawal.

In the April 2022 survey, employee engagement — pride, likelihood to refer a friend, intent to stay — scored 69, down 13 points year over year. Across the 39 metrics Twitter measured, 32 had declined: communication flow fell 12 points, internal communications 16, intent to stay 11, and the largest drop, 24 points, was company confidence. Employees said Musk was an accelerant, but years of ineffective leadership had taken the toll; one departing employee summed up the choice as working for a weird sociopath if the deal closed, or watching the stock fall and pay drop 50% if it didn't.

The leadership story ran back to Dorsey's second six-year run: under him Twitter never built a profitable business despite outsized cultural influence, and his waning attention, dissatisfaction with the COVID-19 response and trust-and-safety stumbles left much of the company in malaise. When Dorsey handed over to Agrawal in November 2021, lieutenants hyped the transition — general manager Kayvon Beykpour called Agrawal 'rigorous and incredibly sharp' and the momentum '🔥' — yet six months later both Beykpour and engineering head Michael Montano were gone, before Musk's purchase even closed.

Employee engagement fell 13 points to 69; 32 of 39 measured metrics declined; company confidence dropped 24 points

Dorsey's waning attention left the company without steady direction through successive crises

Agrawal's team gutted its own bench, losing Beykpour and Montano months into the new era

Years of unresolved trust-and-safety and pandemic-response frustrations eroded confidence survey by survey

A founder's absentee leadership compounds quietly in survey data long before a crisis makes it public

As of 2022-10-28 Musk had taken control, dismissed the top executives, and was expected to lay off hundreds at minimum, with morale so low that many employees were already headed for the door.