Former X exec Crawford moves her desk to Meta

One of Elon Musk’s former employees at X has taken a lucrative position at Meta. 

Esther Crawford, formerly the head of Twitter Blue, announced Monday on Instagram that she joined Meta as Messenger’s director of product. 

“Although I considered a lot of great options, Meta was my top choice because I am obsessed with how humans connect through technology,” Ms. Crawford wrote. “No other company has a bigger scale of impact in that space than Meta.”

---

---

Ms. Crawford became one of the lucky few tech workers at Twitter who survived the massive layoffs Mr. Musk oversaw after taking over the site in late 2022. 

After the layoffs, Mr. Musk instituted a “hardcore” work standard at Twitter, and Ms. Crawford leaned in. She went viral with a photo of her sleeping under her desk. 

“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines, sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” Ms. Crawford wrote in a now-deleted post. 

Ms. Crawford was axed three months later, in February 2023. 

Since leaving what is now called X, Ms. Crawford has opened up about working under Mr. Musk, saying it’s difficult since he’s unpredictable.

Ms. Crawford‘s job switch comes amid the X-Meta rivalry. Both run text-based social media platforms battling over users and advertisers. Mr. Musk has said Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook, make people depressed, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called X too chaotic. 

Mr. Musk has also accused Meta of poaching engineers fired from X to help build its competing app Threads. Meta has denied the claims.