Owner of Twitter Inc. Elon Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," fired two engineers after they publicly disagreed with his tweet about social media being slow in different countries. Bloomberg drew attention to this.
Engineer Eric Fronhoefer, 41, who worked on the Twitter app for the Android mobile operating system, posted one of Musk's tweets on Nov. 13, commenting that Musk's understanding of the technical part of the Twitter app was "wrong." They then began to argue over technical issues, eventually Musk wrote: “Twitter is very slow on Android. What did you do to fix it?" One user asked why Fronhoefer did not discuss these issues with Musk privately, to which the engineer asked in response: “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email." In response, Musk wrote that Fronhoefer was fired.
Fronhoefer retweeted the post and added the welcome emoji many employees used when they were fired earlier this month.
According to the engineer, he did not receive any official notice of dismissal, but just five hours after Musk's tweet about the dismissal, the engineer's laptop, issued on Twitter, stopped working. He told Forbes about it. "My laptop just shut down and now I can't work on it," he said. Fronhöfer worked for the company for eight years.
Another engineer, Ben Leib, was also fired after responding publicly to Musk. He retweeted Musk's same tech post, writing, "As a former Twitter timeline infrastructure tech lead, I can safely say this person has no idea what he's talking about." Leib, who has worked at Twitter for ten years, confirmed to Bloomberg that on Sunday, November 13, he was fired.
Almost immediately after buying Twitter, Musk fired the previous executive team, and about 50% of the company's employees were relieved of their posts. This is more than 7 thousand people, including most of the top managers. Musk also announced that users must pay $8 for a verified account checkbox without any actual verification procedure. Because of the opportunity to impersonate another person in this way, some large advertisers, including General Mills and Volvo, have withdrawn their dollars from the platform.
The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly managed to suffer from the innovation of the Mask with checkmarks. The fake account, which bought itself a verification tick and called itself Eli Lilly, tweeted that insulin is now free. This lowered the company's shares in value, the loss amounted to about $15 million.