After Twitter Inc. let go of thousands of employees lately, it seems today owner Elon Musk added a few staff to the canned account, but this time because they had criticized the way he does things.
Employees have taken to Twitter and to the company’s internal Slack board and aired their views, which seems to have nettled Musk. On Nov. 14, Musk took to Twitter to apologize “for Twitter being super slow in many countries,” and he explained why that was, only for Twitter employee Eric Frohnhoefer to address the same issue and state that Musk was wrong. He explained why, and he and Musk had a back-and-forth, after which Frohnhoefer was fired.
It seems Musk was irked that Frohnhoefer hadn’t brought the matter up in private, which, to be fair, would have been the right thing to do. And to Frohnhoefer’s credit, he later posted on Twitter that the way he’d gone about things was “definitely stupid.”
There seems to have been something of a mutiny at Twitter. After Frohnhoefer received his marching orders, another employee Sasha Solomon also took to Twitter to criticize the company under its new leader. She didn’t publicly have a spat with Musk, regardless, soon after she tweeted, “Lol just got fired for shitposting.”
The mutiny has continued up to today. Now people are posting that Musk has let go 20 employees who have criticized him on the company’s Slack channel. Each received a message that read, “We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated immediately. Your recent behavior has violated company policy.”
The number who have gone could be lower than 20. It’s hard to say at the moment since it hasn’t been made official. “After 12 amazing years and 3 weeks of chaos, I’m officially fired by Twitter,” said one employee that was fired today. “Never expected I would have stayed this long, and never expected I would be this relieved to be gone.”
Musk hasn’t announced how many people have been let go today, but he did leave an ironic tweet about the sudden departures. “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” he said. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”