Following his $44 billion buyout of the significant firm, Elon Musk has engaged in public disputes with an increasing number of Twitter employees about the status of the platform and publicly fired at least one of them in a tweet, which is an exceptionally conspicuous evidence of corporate disarray.
On Monday, Musk and software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer engaged in a Twitter argument that resulted in Musk declaring “he’s fired” and Frohnhoefer admitting he had been denied access to Twitter’s internal systems. After Frohnhoefer tweeted evidence showing Musk was “wrong” about his claims that Twitter was operating, in the billionaire’s words, “very slowly,” in numerous countries, the public termination followed.
Frohnhoefer claimed to have received word of the firing from a friend who forwarded him Musk’s tweet on Monday night, and said that “no one even reached out to me from Twitter.” Frohnhoefer went on to say that while he had been “ready to give it a go” under Musk and that he was “in the wait-and-see camp,” “everything that has been published is true,” he added. He called working for Musk a “complete sh*t show” and said the situation is “chaos” right now.
As of Tuesday morning, at least one other employee who offered context on the matter had also been fired. And a few other Twitter workers claimed on the site on Tuesday that they had received an email informing them that their “behavior has violated company policy,” with some speculating that the action may have been in response to remarks they had made in private Slack channels. Employees have recently been very vocal about Musk on the company’s Slack channel.
Musk tweeted in response to the news of Tuesday’s layoffs: “I’m sorry I let these smart people go. Undoubtedly, someone else will benefit greatly from her enormous talent.”
The layoffs follow Musk’s purported firing of the majority of Twitter’s contractors and cutting half of its personnel, a move that many detractors have criticized as being hasty and potentially dangerous for the network. It’s finished. The removal of Twitter’s management and the dissolution of its board of directors, which increased its control over the company, have also been ascribed to her Musk’s retaliation against people who disagree with Musk’s viewpoints.