Elon Musk’s paranoia: his bodyguards accompany him to the bathroom

At least two bodyguards accompany Elon Musk through Twitter headquarters and they even follow him to the bathroomaccording to a company engineer told al BBC.

The engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his job, said the bodyguards were “unwieldy” and “tall” and as if they were of a “Hollywood movie”.

It’s not a big deal in the context of who Musk is: it is common for figures with high media exposure to be accompanied by bodyguards, or for companies to spend large sums of money providing them with security details. Mark Zuckerberg, in fact, spends a millionaire to ensure his safety.

The engineer said he thought Musk’s use of bodyguards inside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters suggested a lack of trust in the company’s employees, according to the report of BBC published on Sunday.

Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment from various US news outlets asking for comment on the matter.

Musk’s father Errol said in January he feared for his son’s safety even though he was protected from “100 Security Guards”. Musk had upgraded Errol’s security system for his South African home with 24-hour armed guardscameras and electric fences, Errol said.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter in October, Musk laid off thousands of company employees as part of a sweeping campaign to cut costs.

The newspaper The New York Times assured last week that the latest round of layoffs, 9 days ago, resulted in the exit of 10% of the 2,000 people who made up the workforce after several lots of cuts who have left the company with virtually a quarter of the staff since then 7,500 at the time, Elon Musk bought the company.

Twitter: second drop in a week

Meanwhile, the social network remains unstable. During the morning of this Monday, it encountered worldwide problems uploading photos or displaying the desktop version correctly.

The company, which has thus suffered its second global decline in less than a week, did not provide many details on why, other than that it has undertaken “some internal changes with unforeseen consequences”.

According to the DownDetector site, which monitors real-time incidents in major technology companies, the first problems started to be registered around 16:53 GMT and affected users all over the world.

Users of the platform have reported errors when accessing the desktop version through their computer by clicking on links images posted online or on Twitter.

In some cases, messages posted by other users years ago have jumped into the “feed” of some accounts as if they were new.

This is the second drop Twitter has seen in less than a week, after the social network, owned by Elon Musk, suffered failures on Wednesday that prevented some profiles from seeing new messages sent by their followers or updating the homepage.

“Things should work normally. Thanks for joining us!” The social network wrote 50 minutes after admitting in another tweet that “some parts of Twitter are not working as expected at the moment”.