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- Twitter staff nicknamed a Tesla exec “the Elon whisperer” because of his ability to read Elon Musk’s mood.
- Omead Afshar, the Tesla exec, joined Twitter late last year, according to the Financial Times.
- Afshar has reportedly been helping Musk with “the biggest, stickiest issues at the company.”
Twitter staffers have reportedly nicknamed a Tesla executive at the company “the Elon whisperer” because of his ability to read the CEO’s mood.
Omead Afshar, who once led Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, joined Twitter last year and is part of Elon Musk’s tight inner circle, according to the Financial Times.
Afshar has been helping Musk with “the biggest, stickiest issues at the company,” according to the report. Two unnamed sources told the FT he has been negotiating tricky cloud spending contracts with Amazon and Google. According to The Information, Musk’s company is at least $70 million behind on a five-year contract it signed with Amazon Web Services in 2020.
Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
When Musk first acquired the company for $44 billion in October, he laid off around half of Twitter’s staff, including company execs.
Since then, the culture at Twitter has deteriorated and people inside the company headquarters say the billionaire has gotten more stressed. Many engineers are consistently working 80–hour weeks and pulling “all-nighters” to keep up with Musk’s demands, Insider’s Kali Hays reported.
In the company’s latest round of layoffs, Musk fired one of his most loyal lieutenants, Esther Crawford, who went viral last year after a staffer shared a photo of her sleeping on the floor of Twitter HQ amid Musk’s hardcore work culture rollout.
Since then, Twitter has also faced a series of outages, including a glitch in early February that prevented users from posting. Experts previously told Insider that Twitter could break or face technical issues due to a lack of staff.
Afshar isn’t the only person Musk seems to be leaning on at present.
Steve Davis, his long-term associate and the boss of Musk’s Boring Company, has also been working with Twitter for the past few months to help cut costs at Musk’s request. Like Afshar, Davis is also part of Musk’s tight inner circle and is rumored to be next in line to be Twitter’s CEO once Musk steps back.
