Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, can add another title to his already lengthy resume: Big Brother. On Tuesday, the social media executive demonstrated to his colleagues that he was always monitoring what they were saying on Twitter’s internal channels, especially if they disparaged him.
“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere,” Musk tweeted Tuesday around lunchtime.
Numerous Twitter employees who attacked their new leader on the company’s internal Slack forums were sacked overnight. While the precise number is uncertain, There seemed to be approximately 20 persons. Some employees received emails in the middle of the night informing them they had been sacked.
Nick Morgan, a former software engineer at the firm who worked as the Tweet Service’s engineering lead, uploaded a screenshot of the midnight email he received from human resources on Tuesday.
“We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated effective immediately,” the email said. “Your recent behavior has violated company policy.”
According to his LinkedIn page, Morgan had been at Twitter for more than 11 years and believes he was fired for “not showing 100% loyalty in slack.” The software developer went on to say that he has heard of similar incidents involving other former coworkers.
Sasha Solomon, a staff software engineer and the co-tech lead of Twitter’s Core API platform team, also claimed she was dismissed for “shitposting.”
“lol just got fired for shitposting. i said it before and i’ll say it again. kiss my ass elon,” Solomon tweeted on Tuesday.
The nocturnal firings came only one day after the firm’s owner, Jack Dorsey, dismissed Eric Frohnhoefer, a software developer who had been with the business for more than eight years, by tweet on Monday. Musk also dismissed around 4,400 of Twitter’s 5,500 contract workers over the weekend.
Frohnhoefer had openly rebuffed Musk’s explanation for why Twitter was sluggish in some regions, asserting unequivocally that his boss was incorrect. After that, Musk demanded to know the true issue and asked Frohnhoefer what he had done to improve Twitter’s performance on Android.
Finally, a third person remarked on Frohnhoefer and Musk’s public debate, saying, “with this kind of attitude, you probably don’t want this guy on your team.” Within a minute, Musk responded, “He’s fired.” The billionaire then deleted the “He’s fired” tweet, even though everyone had seen it.
Notably, @nickrw, the engineer dismissed on Tuesday, had publicly chastised Musk, accusing him of not knowing what he was talking about. @nickrw blasted Musk on Monday for his statements on the platform’s microservices.
“This is what happens when you fire everyone that could give you advice which would, hypothetically, stop you from embarrassing yourself in public,” @nickrw said.
Overall, it appears like Musk is moving closer to abandoning email and Slack in favor of administering Twitter solely on Twitter.
He’s used it to crowdsource complaints, argue product name changes, and, most recently, terminate workers who disagree with him or call him out on his BS. When it comes to employees, though, this is unlikely to be the last time we hear about it.