Twitter Executives Play Quarterly Game Of Musical Chairs

Shareholders, board members, and journalists alike clamored outside of Twitter HQ this morning in hopes of hearing the results of Twitter’s quarterly game of executive musical chairs.

This Quarter Quell, conducted to the tune of Yakety Sax, saw CEO Jack Dorsey keep the seat that he won last year from incumbent Dick Costolo. However, some other executives were not so lucky.

VP of Global Media Katie Stanton, Senior VP of Product Kevin Weil, Senior VP of Engineering Alex Roetter, and VP of Human Resources Brian Schipper were displaced by a surprise alliance of CTO Adam Messinger and COO Adam Bain. Team Adam, as the duo named themselves, dove onto multiple seats and are now taking on additional responsibilities in the product, media, HR, design, and engineering departments that were previously the domain of the losing VPs.

Musical chairs has been a long standing tradition for Twitter. In the early days of the company, a key employee was ousted and subsequently written out of company history due to a moment of indecision when deciding whether to dive for one seat or the other. Nowadays, Twitter’s executive turnover is significantly higher than other Silicon Valley companies, as the average VP’s tenure at Twitter lasted around 4 months.

One former high-level Twitter executive who requested anonymity for this article described the game as “more like Russian roulette than any normal game of musical chairs.” The executive went on to explain that the turnover reflected the exceptional skill and ferocity of Twitter’s institutional musical chairs expertise, where even junior employees can hone their abilities in quarterly practice sessions known as “performance reviews.”

Mr. Dorsey announced in a tweet that the losers of this year’s game “have chosen to leave the company” and would be “taking some well-deserved time off.”