'Experiencing the Five Stages of Grief': On Twitter's internal message boards, employees are freaking out over Musk

Employees raised their concerns about Musk's takeover on the business communication network Slack. "Physically cringy hearing Elon lecture about free speech," remarked one employee, a site reliability engineer who identifies as a "nonbinary transgender and plural person."

"We're all going through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone's nerves are frazzled," a senior staff engineer said, referring to Musk as a "a**hole." "We're all spinning our wheels, coming up with worst-case scenarios (Trump returns! )," they continued. There will be no more moderation!). The truth is that [Musk] hasn't spoken much about what he's intending outside of broad generalizations that could be construed as exaggerated showboating."

"Not the place to say that, but I will not work for this firm after the takeover," said one senior staff video engineer in the event of a Musk acquisition. Some employees began to worry that Slack conversations could be seen, forcing many to switch to the encrypted chat tool Signal to address the matter.

Musk's position on free speech, according to one reliability engineering manager, is "cover for 'I don't want to be held accountable for expressing or spreading damaging things.'" "Self-reported censorship is sometimes simply nasty people f—king around and then finding out," one person said, to which a senior content strategist replied, "and it doesn't happen frequently enough."

Outside of Twitter, the same content strategist has worked as a left-wing political operative and has been vociferous in his criticism of Musk. "Sometimes I think it can't be as horrible as I'm envisioning it'll be," she said in response to Musk's post last week. Then I see something like this and I think to myself, "Nope, it'll be even worse."

"The problem with @elonmusk is that he has established a record of destructive behavior that disproportionately hurts marginalized people, so maybe let's not give him any more power than he already took," one engineering manager called Jay Holler said. "I'm radicalized now," Holler later added.