Elon Musk Criticizes Twitter Executive, Drawing Employee Backlash

On Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted an image of Ms. Gadde, overlaid with text that repeated allegations that Twitter has a left-wing political bias. Mr. Musk’s followers and others on Twitter soon retweeted his message more than 20,000 times, and some added racist and sexist messages directed at Ms. Gadde, including that she should be fired and should go back to India.

Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk and Ms. Gadde didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The episode delineates the tension underlying Mr. Musk’s imminent ownership of one of the world’s most influential social-media networks. Mr. Musk often directs his combative style on Twitter at people he disagrees with, which can lead to pile-ons by his fans. Twitter executives have argued that minimizing harassment and abuse is the best possible way to ensure as many users as possible can speak freely on the site. Mr. Musk has said those efforts have gone too far, and that he would prefer to allow any speech that isn’t expressly illegal. Mr. Musk’s posts also highlight the difficulties facing Twitter’s board and executives, who are operating according to policies and practices that the company’s future owner disagrees with. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mr. Musk’s tweets pose a risk to the takeover agreement.

On Wednesday morning, Twitter employees asked in internal Slack discussions whether Mr. Musk’s activity on Twitter this week breached the terms of the acquisition, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The people said employees also questioned the silence of former chief executive, co-founder and board member Jack Dorsey, who relied on Ms. Gadde’s judgment to navigate thorny content-moderation questions. On Monday evening, hours after Mr. Musk’s $44 billion deal to take the company private was announced, Mr. Dorsey endorsed him in a series of tweets, saying among other things that “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”

Mr. Dorsey didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

After Mr. Musk tweeted criticism of a past decision by Twitter to suspend a news publication’s account, a decision that would have fallen under Ms. Gadde’s purview, she faced renewed scrutiny online this week. Colleagues rushed to support Ms. Gadde and urged the company to make a public statement responding to the tweets, according to employees.

Ms. Gadde internally thanked employees Wednesday for their support but said she would rather the news cycle pass than have the company respond publicly, according to people familiar with the matter. “Letting this cycle pass and focusing on the important work we do everyday is the best path forward,” Ms. Gadde wrote on an internal Slack channel to employees that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

About half an hour after her internal message, Mr. Musk posted the meme using Ms. Gadde’s face.

Twitter CEO

Parag Agrawal

posted what appeared to be a response to Mr. Musk’s tweets without mentioning them specifically: “I took this job to change Twitter for the better, course correct where we need to, and strengthen the service,” he tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “Proud of our people who continue to do the work with focus and urgency despite the noise.”

Mr. Musk’s comments drew outrage from former Twitter executives. “What’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats,” tweeted Dick Costolo, who was Twitter’s CEO from 2010 to 2015.

In a separate tweet, Mr. Costolo wrote: “Bullying is not leadership.”

In Twitter’s early years, the company tried to take a more hands-off approach to removing content from its platform. “We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party,” Mr. Costolo said at a conference in 2011, a phrase echoed by other Twitter executives at the time.

This changed in 2018, following the harassment of several celebrities on the platform, when Twitter executives began to fear that toxic content was deterring new people from joining and alienating potential advertisers.

Mr. Dorsey publicly committed to reducing abuse and harassment on the platform.

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” Mr. Dorsey said in a post to Twitter in 2018. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”

The work to write the policies that dictated what would be allowed on Twitter, and to figure out how to enforce them, largely fell to Ms. Gadde and her team. In her 10 years at the company, she and other Twitter executives received blowback and death threats from terrorist organizations, including Islamic State, that prompted Twitter to provide armed guards at times, according to people familiar with the matter.

Current and former Twitter employees said Mr. Dorsey’s lack of public comment Wednesday shocked them because they expected him to take responsibility for the biggest and most controversial decisions that occurred during his tenure as CEO.

The most recent episode began Tuesday, when Saagar Enjeti, a right-wing political podcast host, tweeted a screenshot of a Politico article that reported Ms. Gadde cried as she sought to reassure Twitter employees about Mr. Musk’s acquisition of the company. Mr. Enjeti described Ms. Gadde as “the top censorship advocate at Twitter.”

An hour and a half later, Mr. Musk responded to that tweet: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

Mr. Musk was referring to Twitter’s decision to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account after the newspaper published articles it said were based on documents obtained from the laptop of

Hunter Biden,

President Biden’s son. Twitter cited its policy against posting material that contains personal material obtained through hacking. Mr. Dorsey later called that move a mistake and Twitter lifted the suspension.

Tweets mentioning Ms. Gadde alongside hateful comments followed Mr. Musk’s reply, with some calling her evil and saying she should be fired.

—Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Georgia Wells at georgia.wells+1@wsj.com