Elon Musk fired a Twitter employee on… Twitter. For criticism

Elon Musk introduced a new order on the platform immediately after taking over Twitter. First, he fired a number of key managers, and then he got rid of about half of all employees. He also increased the Twitter Blue subscription fee to $8

Elon Musk is getting rid of employees who criticize Twitter

Almost three weeks have passed since the takeover of the site, but the criticism leveled at Musk continues unabated. Now the billionaire is getting rid of employees who dared to write unfavorably about the platform. And this despite the fact that – as Musk assures – there should be true freedom of speech on Twitter.

As they enumerate, the billionaire has already fired several (at least three) employees who publicly criticized Musk’s new deal or the operation of the platform. The flashpoint turned out to be a tweet in which the new owner of Twitter apologizes for the slow operation of the platform. There, Musk stated that “the application executes over 1,000 mismatched RPC packets just to render the timeline.”

Ben Leib, a former technical manager for the timeline infrastructure, stated that “this man (Musk – ed.) has no idea what he’s talking about.” Bloomberg reported that Leib was fired on Sunday after 10 years at Twitter.

Even more controversial is the firing of Eric Frohnhoefer, who, after 6 years of working in the Android smartphone application team, was fired from Twitter… on Twitter.

The new owner of the platform publicly announced his dismissal after Frohnhoefer responded to Musk’s tweet. A former employee of the company said that what the billionaire wrote about Twitter and RPC packages is not true.

When Musk asked what Frohnhoefer did to improve the performance of the platform, the engineer explained that a lot of work was put into finding the cause and it is not the number of requests that slows down the application. He added that the main reason is overloading it with not very useful features and add-ons.

Then there was a brief exchange of views on Twitter. When one Twitter user wrote to Musk that “with behavior like this, you probably don’t want this guy on the team”, the billionaire wrote back shortly – “Is fired”. Interestingly, after several hours (already on Tuesday) he deleted his post, leaving the rest of the tweets.

However, Eric Frohnhoefer himself on the night of Monday to Tuesday posted a photo showing that he had lost access to his employee account. “I guess it’s official now,” he added, referring to his release. He also changed the workplace in the description from “still Twitter” to “formerly Twitter”.

Musk makes fun of the senator’s account. “Looks like a parody”

Layoffs are not the only controversial behavior of Musk. On Friday, Ed Markey, a US senator from Massachusetts, who sits on the communications, media, space and science committees, sent an official letter to the billionaire. In it, he asked how it was possible that a Washington Post journalist could create an account impersonating him (Markey) and it was verified as real.

He also uploaded a scan of the document to the platform and added that “Twitter needs to explain how this happened and how to prevent it.”

Elon Musk’s reaction was not only frivolous, but also offensive. The billionaire stated that “maybe it’s because your real account looks like a parody”. When “People for Bernie” responded on Twitter that “trolling a high-ranking senator … is not the best idea,” Musk asked: “Are you suggesting that the senator will abuse his power to attack me?”

It is not known whether the billionaire responded in any other way to the politician’s letter (he has until November 25 to do so). It is known, however, that in recent days he has also encountered the problem of accounts impersonating him. Not surprisingly, they were immediately blocked by Twitter.