In the year and a half since Elon Musk unceremoniously cut 50% of jobs at Twitter (now X), we’ve seen alumni of the firm resurface in a number of places. An exceedingly rare destination has been hedge funds, but one software engineer who survived the cuts has just left to join Citadel.
Linyun Fu, based in New York, joins Citadel after eight years working at Twitter. Fu is a distributed systems developer, and spent that time developing apps in Finagle, an open-source, Scala based system for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
While not part of the mass layoffs, Fu’s tenure at Twitter was somewhat terminal due to Musk dropping support for the firm’s open source projects. Evidently, the work was appreciated elsewhere.
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Twitter staff don’t tend to congregate in finance; social media data suggests the majority of major hedge funds, banks and trading firms haven’t hired any since the cuts. Capital One is an exception; it has hired a few senior Twitter alums in 2024 for its growing AI team. One is Juan Daniel LĂłpez Serna, who left just before the layoffs to work on self-driving cars with Cruise. He’s now a senior director working in generative AI.
Citadel has also had a penchant for hiring from big tech in recent months for more culture-focused roles. Considering the backlash Musk has faced from X employees, this may be one firm they wouldn’t want to emulate.
Citadel declined a request for comment.
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