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“Some personal news: I’ve joined the Messenger team at Meta as Director of Product,” Esther Crawford wrote in an Instagram post on Monday.
Crawford was Twitter’s director of product management for over two years before she was laid off in February 2023.
“Although I considered a lot of great options, Meta was my top choice because I am obsessed with how humans connect through technology — and no other company has a bigger scale of impact in that space than Meta, which connects nearly 4B people (half of humanity),” Crawford said in her post.
Besides lauding “the exceptional quality of the people” working at Meta, Crawford said she was attracted by Zuckerberg’s “vision and intensity.”
“Seeing how he’s made the company more efficient and less bureaucratic in the past year makes me even more bullish to be joining now because I want to move fast and ship awesome products,” Crawford said of Zuckerberg.
Crawford’s announcement comes just over a year after her departure from X. She joined Twitter in December 2020 after the company acquired her video chat startup, Squad.
Crawford was identified as one of Elon Musk’s top lieutenants after he took over the company in October 2022. Besides being put in charge of the subscription service Twitter Blue, Crawford made headlines when she publicly embraced Musk’s hardcore work culture.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” Crawford tweeted in November 2022, after reposting a now-deleted photo of herself sleeping in Twitter’s office.
But despite surviving Twitter’s first three rounds of layoffs, Crawford was eventually let go in February 2023. She eventually revealed her thoughts on Musk and his leadership in July of that year.
“In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny,” Crawford wrote on X in July 2023, adding that Musk likes “telling the same stories and jokes over and over.”
She said Musk could be difficult to deal with because “his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry.”
“Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him,” Crawford said.
“At times, it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said,” she added.
Crawford’s latest career move could be an indicator of big moves Zuckerberg may be making in his bid to vanquish Musk’s X. In July, Zuckerberg launched Threads, a text-based app that’s Meta’s answer to Twitter.
“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” Zuckerberg said in July, regarding Threads’ odds of dethroning X.
That said, Crawford told BI she won’t stop using X just because she joined Meta.
“I do plan to keep using both X and Threads,” she said in an email to BI on Monday. “I’m a big believer in using all social products that one can as a product builder.”
Representatives for Meta and X didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
