UPDATE: Twitter seems to have also fired several more employees for posting messages critical of Elon Musk in the company's internal Slack messages.
Original story:
Elon Musk ostensibly bought Twitter to prioritize free speech, but he's apparently not a fan of Twitter’s own employees using the platform to criticize his actions.
The company has now fired four employees after they publicly rebuked Musk on Twitter. “lol just got fired for shitposting,” Twitter software engineer Sasha Solomon tweeted on Monday, adding: “kiss my ass elon.”
On Tuesday, another employee named Nick Morgan also reported he had been fired a day after he wrote a tweet critical of Musk's leadership.
"Your recent behavior has violated company policy," Twitter wrote to Morgan in an email notifying him about his dismissal from the company.
The firings follow a controversial tweet Musk made on Sunday about Twitter’s app suffering slowdowns. Musk blamed the problem on “poorly batched” remote procedure calls (RPC) in the app, which can allow one program to use the services of another program remotely.
“App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk alleged.
However, Twitter employees were quick to respond to Musk’s original tweet by disputing the claim. Among them was Eric Frohnhoefer, a software engineer for Twitter’s Android app, who tweeted back: “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”
After a back-and-forth over the causes behind the app slowdowns, Musk fired Frohnhoefer via a tweet on Monday when a separate Twitter user chimed in to say: “with this kind of attitude, you probably don’t want this guy on your team.” Musk responded in a now-deleted tweet to say that Frohnhoefer was fired.
On the same day, Solomon tweeted she too been fired—a day after she criticized Musk for initiating mass layoffs at Twitter only to then complain about software quality problems.
“You don’t get to shit on our [infrastructure] if you don’t know what the fuck it does while you’re also scrambling to rehire folks you laid off,” she wrote, later adding in another tweet: “just because some dipshit doesn't understand what we built doesn't make it (or us) any less awesome.”
Bloomberg also reports that a third employee, Ben Leib, was also fired. On Sunday, Leib responded to Musk’s tweet about the app slowdowns by writing back: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he's talking about.” According to Bloomberg, Leib was then let go on Sunday.
The firings add to the ongoing turbulence facing the social media platform, which Musk bought by taking $13 billion in debt. He’s now scrambling to find ways to cut costs and generate revenue at a company that’s historically struggled to turn a profit.
Despite the pushback from the now ex-employees, Musk still insists that poorly batched remote procedure calls are behind the app slowdowns. “I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong,” he wrote in a tweet on Monday.
Meanwhile, Frohnhoefer wrote on Tuesday: "Just woke up to the news that more Tweeps were summarily fired last night. At this rate no one will be left to run Twitter."