Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is now a done deal and as you might imagine not everyone is happy about it. You may have seen some of the tweets from people threatening to leave the site now that Musk owns it. Someone created this mocking meme aimed at those folks.

WHO DID THIS @grandoldmemes pic.twitter.com/1qZTYSG4ii

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 25, 2022

The NY Times published a story this afternoon about how employees of the company are reacting. Somewhat surprisingly, not everyone who works there is unhappy about the change.

In January 2020, thousands of Twitter employees gathered in Houston for a corporate summit called #OneTeam. During the event, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, revealed he had invited a surprise guest. Then, with a wave and a smile, Elon Musk appeared on giant screens above the stage. The crowd cheered, clapped and pumped fists. “We love you,” one employee shouted.

Inside Twitter today, surprise announcements about Mr. Musk land differently. Employees said they had largely stopped celebrating the richest man in the world since he declared his intent this month to buy Twitter, scrap its content moderation policies and transform the publicly traded company into a private one…

Employees said they worried that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work they had put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform, upend their stock compensation in the process of taking the company private and disrupt Twitter’s culture with his unpredictable management style and abrupt proclamations.

But Mr. Musk also has fans among Twitter’s rank-and-file, and some employees have welcomed his bid. In an internal Slack message seen by The New York Times that asked if employees were excited about Mr. Musk, about 10 people responded with a “Yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

So that NY Times report is fairly measured but another Times reporter suggested on Twitter that people at the company were freaking out.

Its “absolutely insane” @ Twitter right now in the virtual valves of private slack rooms & employee group texts, according to an internal source. Their take/breakdown just now:
“I feel like im going to throw up..I rly don’t wanna work for a company that is owned by Elon Musk”…1/

— talmon joseph smith (@talmonsmith) April 25, 2022

The employee continued re Elon: 3/“ I feel like he’s this petulant little boy and that he’s doing this to troll…he doesn’t know anything about our policies and what we do…his statement about our algo was fucking insane…
“Were just gonna let everyone run amok?…nobody knows”

— talmon joseph smith (@talmonsmith) April 25, 2022

There was a 4th tweet in that thread in which an employee described themselves as “pretty broken” by the news but for some reason Smith deleted it. Yashar Ali reports that the top question coming from the staff right now isn’t about the product it’s about whether employees will still be able to work from home.

I have friends that work there, and this is literally the ONLY major issue they care about.

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) April 25, 2022

So there may be some level of freakout happening but not all of it is of the anti-Musk, anti-free-speech variety. Still, it’s fun to imagine.

From @thebabylonbee: Twitter employee undergoes therapy due to imminent @elonmusk takeover pic.twitter.com/WXziVOtU6q

— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) April 25, 2022

Update: And Twitter has locked its code to prevent employees from making unauthorized changes.

Twitter Inc. locked down changes to its social networking platform through Friday after accepting a $44 billion bid from billionaire Elon Musk, making it harder for employees to make unauthorized changes, according to people familiar with the matter.

For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private.

Does this mean they were worried about unhinged employees making some kind of protest via the code? Or maybe Musk wants to make sure it’s preserved as is so he can make the status quo public.

Update: It seems some employees are trying to make a statement.

🚨 BREAKING: Twitter employees are openly rebelling against Elon Musk.

He said he wanted to make the Twitter algorithm open source.

They just trolled him using Twitter's official Github: posting a public repo entitled "The Algorithm" with zero code. pic.twitter.com/tOfmxyYjC6

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) April 25, 2022

Update: Looking at this chart, there are certainly a lot of unhappy people at Twitter right now, people for whom Musk is just not progressive enough.

Reminder. 98.7% of donations from Twitter employees went to Democrats. pic.twitter.com/Odp4eyesls

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) April 25, 2022