Twitter’s Last Pre-Musk Executives Resign

Tom Jowitt,
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Katie Marcotte, a 10-year Twitter veteran and it’s acting head of human resources, plus product engineering head Behnam Rezaei, have resigned

Two of the last remaining executives at Twitter before Elon Musk took control and purged most of the workforce and its management, have resigned.

Platformer reporter Casey Newton tweeted that Katie Marcotte, a 10-year Twitter employee and the company’s acting head of human resources, has left the company.

Meanwhile product engineering head Behnam Rezaei confirmed on Twitter that he has left, saying it was a “personal decision.”

Image credit: Elon Musk

Cost cutting

It comes as Twitter this week relaxed its total ban on political adverts, as the platform confronts a revenue crisis, after advertisers including General Motors and Pfizer, paused spending amid fears of a rise in divisive content on the platform after Musk’s botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service.

Research firm Pathmatics has noted that about 70 percent of Twitter’s top 100 advertising clients were not spending on the platform as of mid-December.

Advertising of course is Twitter’s main source of revenue, accounting for 90 percent of its $5.1bn turnover in 2021.

Twitter was also in the news this week when a landlord in San Francisco sued Twitter over failing to pay rent on its headquarters in the city, amidst a cost-cutting drive.

Twitter has also been sued for failing to pay for two charter flights.

Executive departures

Now two senior executives have this week also left Twitter.

According to Casey Newton, Twitter this week lost a Twitter veteran and senior management figure.

There were no reasons given for the departure of Katie Marcotte from the platform, but she had until now survived Musk’s brutal job purges and his infamous “hardcore” Twitter 2.0 email.

“Rooting for all my people still left,” she reportedly wrote. “Tonight, the good wine. 🍷”

The same survival was true of Twitter’s former head of product and engineering Behnam Rezaei, who in a series of tweets thanked by name many of his Twitter colleagues, and also Elon Musk whom he worked with at 3am.

Behnam Rezaei had joined Twitter in 2017, before taking over as the lead of Twitter’s global product engineering across both revenue and consumer sectors last November.