Elon Musk fired a Twitter developer in a tweet on Monday after the employee contradicted him online.
The incident started after Musk tweeted an apology for the speed of the Twitter app on Android devices, and then software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer sent off a tweet saying he disagreed with Musk.
I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong. https://t.co/sh30ZxpD0N
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 13, 2022
Musk was eventually tagged in Frohnhoefer’s tweet by other users, and the new Twitter CEO bluntly wrote ‘He’s fired.’
Twitter has not confirmed whether or not Frohnhoefer was actually sacked, but sources told the Daily Beast his Slack account within Twitter was offline Monday.
Frohnhoefer – who worked for Twitter for eight years, according to his LinkedIn – also tweeted out a photo of a locked laptop screen and wrote ‘Guess it is official now,’ suggesting he may have truly been canned.
Guess it is official now. pic.twitter.com/5SRwotyD8J
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
The incident comes as Musk has already begun to cut scores of jobs at Twitter after vowing to fire up to seventy-five percent of his staff.
Since acquiring Twitter Musk has fired several employees of the company including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Legal and even the Board of Directors. He has also made a flurry of decisions impacting the working of Twitter which has millions of daily active users.
Among the biggest change that Twitter is seeing is the inclusion of the new USD 7.99 per month Blue subscription. However, Musk’s decision to implement the blue tick fee did not go well with many. Even some advertisers pulled back from the site.
Meanwhile, Musk during his first address to Twitter employees since purchasing the company for $44 billio had said that bankruptcy was a possibility if it doesn’t start generating more cash.
The warning came amid a tumultuous start to Musk’s reign at the social media company — a two-week period in which he has fired half of Twitter’s staff, ushered out most of the top executives and ordered the remaining employees to stop working from home. Two executives who until today had emerged as part of Musk’s new leadership team, Yoel Roth and Robin Wheeler, are also on the way out, people familiar with the situation said.
