Twitter’s living wake kicked off with Elon’s 5PM deadline

We don’t know how many of Twitter’s employees looked at Elon Musk’s “take three months’ severance or agree to stay and get Xtreme” offer and decided to head for the exits, but by all available accounts, it was a lot of them.

As my colleagues Alex Heath and Mia Sato report, the departure of entire important teams leads people who know Twitter well to think that it’s only a matter of time until things break down. According to the New York Times, some “critical” employees were pulled into meetings with Musk and his advisors, who tried to persuade them to stay as the time ticked down.

So if this is the end of Twitter, the only thing left to do is… tweet about it.

Some people are planning their moves to Instagram. Mastodon, MySpace, or names even older than that, but most of the active posts noticeably fall somewhere along the five stages of grief.

The mood has shifted from denial to leave space for acceptance and bargaining — and there’s surprisingly little anger. That even goes for the man who spent months trying to undo his $44 billion bid before being forced to make good on it and skyrocketing up the Go90 scale of doomed services in pursuit of a $7.99 per month pipe dream. And yes, he’s tweeting his way through it too.

The microservices are still live enough (for now), so whether it’s an extreme take, a risky DM, or just another idle observation, this feels like the time to post that tweet before we all move on to wasting time somewhere else.