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- One of the last remaining execs from pre-Elon Musk Twitter has left the company.
- Behnam Rezaei, Twitter’s head of product and engineering, had worked at the company since 2017.
- Musk said in December that Twitter had around 2,000 staff left. It had more than 7,500 at the end of 2021.
One of the last remaining execs from “Twitter 1.0” has left the company.
Behnam Rezaei, Twitter’s head of product and engineering, said in a series of tweets that he left Twitter on Tuesday.
“It has been an absolute honor working with so many amazing people in the last 5.5 years,” he tweeted. “It was wilder than I could have ever imagined with so many stories and unforgettable moments.”
Rezaei joined Twitter as its senior director of engineering in August 2017, and became its product engineering lead in November 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Before Rezaei confirmed his departure, Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer had reported the news, saying he resigned from the company. In his tweets, Rezaei did not specify whether he resigned or was laid-off.
Since buying Twitter in late October, Elon Musk has laid off thousands of the company’s staff. Some, however, have left of their own accord, saying Musk had changed the company’s culture and expressing worries about the site’s future. Musk’s vision for “Twitter 2.0” includes workers being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity.”
Rezaei is just one of many high-ranking execs to leave the company amid an exodus of long-serving staff.
Platformer journalist Casey Newton tweeted on Tuesday night that Katie Marcotte, a 10-year Twitter employee and the company’s acting head of human resources, had announced that she was leaving the company.
Some Twitter users suggested that Marcotte may have chosen to stay at the company until the end of the severance period for the roughly 50% of Twitter staff laid off on November 4.
It didn’t take long for staff to start leaving. Just the day after Musk’s deal to buy Twitter went through, Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, quit.
Chief people and diversity officer Dalana Brand resigned the next week. Twitter’s VP for real estate and work transformation and its SVP finance both quit not long after, following around a decade each at the company.
Musk said on a podcast in December that Twitter had around 2,000 staff left, a huge drop compared to the more than 7,500 full-time employees it had at the end of 2021. Musk has drafted in some staff from his other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, to plug the gap.
Former Twitter staff have used the moniker “Twitter 1.0” to refer to the company pre-Musk. In social-media posts, the ex-employees have said they “had it good at Twitter 1.0” and shared their memories from the company using the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked.
“If product challenges are what got me to Twitter, people were what got me to stay,” Rezaei tweeted. “Twitter had and still has some of the brightest people in the industry.”
This content was originally published here.
