This part really stood out to me:<p>"Mr. Agrawal said the “nature of this situation” limited what he was allowed to share with employees"<p>Even when things are a bit contentious, companies and C-level execs like CISOs usually come to an agreement and have a joint statement about 'spending time with family' or 'pursuing other endeavors'. This sounds like it was either very one-sided, or something very bad was happening...
For whatever it's worth, Lea Kissner has a pretty great reputation among the security nerds I talk to, and you'd assume that if something shady or dramatic was happening here, Kissner wouldn't be happily jumping into the lion's jaws.<p>Twitter has been shaking up management for a couple months now. I have no inside knowledge, but this is pretty plausibly just more of the same kind of thing.
I remember commenting when Mudge was hired that Twitter/Jack needed someone of that profile to offset his massive organizational weight as a founder, where Zatko would have the technical and community cred to make decisions for the entire org without, a) other people going around him and trying to get Jack's attention, and b) to demonstrate there is no doubt about the competence of the security team of the platform to satisfy some regulatory risk. I also thought it sounded like a bit of an overpowered choice for the role, unless it was <i>not</i> intended to be long term, and mostly as a tactical near term solution. That may have forshadowed this development a bit as well.<p>Into the territory of startup fanfic, I'd assert from Agrawal's perspective, he needs his own team, and a top technologist indexed on engineering competence is overpowered as an individual at that level - and for the agility the CEO will need for the next stage of his company. He needs his own people to execute for him. The company is no longer a startup, and its explosive growth phase is behind it. Now it's an asset to be managed, and doing that is an orthogonal set of skills to building and managing growth, so you need people who operate aligned to a longer horizon. The previous CEO's tactical super-hire isn't necessarily going to be the same asset for a new CEO's strategy.<p>It's odd to comment on this like its sports writing, but that's effectively what following these companies is. Knowing very little about the individuals, I don't need to mind read, as there are clear external incentives for this that make it a fairly neutral change.<p>When you inherit a powerful asset like that, as CEO that can be double edged. It's great to have someone that amazing around, but if they can undermine the momentum in your leadership even (especially?) unintentionally, while you're driving a massive organizational change, the choice really makes itself independent of the individual characteristics of the people involved.<p>Ceasing to work at twitter is probably the least interesting thing Zatko has ever done, so I don't forsee this reflecting on him at all, but before there are drill downs on personalities and culture stuff, it's worth looking at it from straight business incentives.
Remember like a year and half ago when some of the most powerful people on the planet had their Twitter accounts hacked in some bitcoin scam and then the story just sort of went away without any real discussion about how dangerous that could have been if the hackers had different motivations (EDIT: there was an implied "and how to prevent that in the future" here)?
I'm probably drawing early conclusions, but it's not a surprise hearing an engineering head or ex-CTO type eliminate security given security is often seen as a roadblock, even in Twitter's case where their leadership and team often worked to make it a business enablement function.
After Mudge got the position I had a feeling it wouldn't last, but I figured it would be later. It's sad to see him go, but I'm sure he'll continue to do awesome stuff.
This guy really irks me. For one, since he took over it really seems Twitter is heading towards a direction to suit activist investor demands. I used to be able to browse Twitter posts of people I tend to respect (mainly scientific and academic people) without having to login and it is getting increasingly difficult without doing so lately as they keep showing me the login screen.<p>This guy has a toxic history of narcissistic behavior as reported in several local Indian social
Media and he would only seem to suck up to corporate demand and make Twitter more suffocating.
My crazy wild guess: they had a weird internal tantrum because of Twitter's PR moves around cryptocurrencies, and they got fired because they went too far.