If Mark Cuban thought Elon Musk was turning Twitter into a “nightmare” last week, wait until he sees what has been happening this week.
Elon Musk has been mass firing Twitter employees who talked bad about him the company’s Slack and even made a disability joke about one of them on the way out.
Yes, it’s been quite a day.
Much of it began Tuesday morning when a Twitter account, @unusual_whales, wrote, “Elon has fired numerous employees who were critical of him on Twitter and the company’s Slack, according to Protocal.”
Being the true leader that he is, Elon Musk, of course, fired back with a smartass comment.
I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
One of those fired Twitter employees, software engineer Nick Morgan, the tech lead of the Tweet Service, posted a photo of the email he received at midnight Monday night.
Gizmodo reports that Morgan had been working at Twitter for more than 11 years.
“My twitter account was protected at the time, so I can only assume this was for not showing 100% loyalty in slack,” Morgan wrote in a follow up tweet. “I’ve heard the same thing has happened to many others now.”
According to software engineer Sasha Solomon, the co-tech lead of Twitter’s Core API platform team, Morgan wasn’t wrong.
https://twitter.com/sachee/status/1592308273071681536
Two other Twitter engineers also tweeted they were fired for the same offense.
Musk has apparently been following all of the Twitter firings being posted on the account @libsoftiktok because he’s spending a lot of time commenting on their tweets. On one of them, Musk made a disability joke about the fired Sasha Solomon.
A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
Many users of Twitter, for obvious reasons, took offense to Musk’s tweet joking about a disability
I’m a mother of a kid with Tourette’s. It’s not a punchline or a joke. It’s making fun of people. And it’s cruel.
— Piccolo Pete (Lizzie) 🇺🇸🏳️🌈💙 (@pete_piccolo) November 15, 2022
All of this comes the day after Musk got into a Twitter fight with another longtime Twitter software engineer, Eric Frohnhoefer, who publicly disagreed with Musk over why Twitter was running slow in some regions.
Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
Sparing you all the rest of Frohnhoefer’s tweet replies to Musk, here they are in one image.
Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email. 🤷♂️
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Musk almost immediately tweeted out, then deleted, that he was firing Frohnhoefer.
Before the first round of layoffs, employees were reminding each other to keep their heads down and out of the way of Musk.
If they got laid off, they’d get severance. But if they pushed back against Elon? They’d get fired. No severance.
Very normal work environment. pic.twitter.com/o9dQAHJCPn
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 14, 2022
Several of the employees fired overnight took to, you guessed it, Twitter to express their disappointment
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.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
Welp that’s it for me folks!
“Your recent behavior has violated company policy.”
If you ask me why exactly I really don’t know 🫡
— Lananana (@svetlanathon) November 15, 2022
“That’s it for me. 8.5 years as an SRE at Twitter and I’ve just been fired. I’m grateful to all my colleagues for getting to learn from and grow with you all. I’m proud of the thing we built. I’m sad to see what’s happened to it. Looking forward to taking a break,” another fired Twitter employee wrote.
After 12 amazing years and 3 weeks of chaos, I’m officially fired by Twitter.
Never expected I would have stayed this long, and never expected I would be this relieved to be gone.
I have a lot of stories to tell. But to my fellow (ex-)tweeps-#LoveWhereYouWorked 🫡 pic.twitter.com/lVWbqpcSXO
— Yao Yue 岳峣 (@thinkingfish) November 15, 2022
Oh, and don’t worry about Frohnhoefer. He appears to be doing just fine.
Thank. My LinkedIn account has never been more popular.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Eric, this thread is absolutely bonkers. We’re hiring senior and staff Android engineers at Reddit. We won’t treat you like this.
— Jameson (@softwarejameson) November 14, 2022