Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” has resorted to firing company engineers who publicly criticise him on the social media service, Bloomberg reported.
Musk who has always been known to think out loud, fired engineer Eric Frohnhoefer publicly, who worked on Twitter’s app for the Android mobile operating system.
On November 13, Musk tweeted “Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”
Frohnhoefer, who worked on Twitter for Android, replied back to Musk saying: “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”
Musk then went on to publicly punish Frohnhoefer by saying, “Then please correct me. What is the right number?” and “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”
After attempting to explain his thinking in a number of tweets, Frohnhoefer was asked by another user why he hadn’t shared his feedback with his new boss privately, Bloomberg reported. The engineer, who has worked at Twitter for more than eight years, replied, “maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.”
On Monday morning, Musk took it to Twitter to say Frohnhoefer had been fired. Frohnhoefer retweeted that post, and included a saluting emoji that many employees used when they were laid off earlier this month.
Twitter and Frohnhoefer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on his status.
Another engineer, Ben Leib, was also fired after calling out Musk. He retweeted the same technical post from Musk, writing, “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.” Leib, who worked at Twitter for a decade, confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday.
Follow us on
