Twitter Inc owner Elon Musk, who claims to be the master of freedom of expression, has fired engineers who publicly criticized him on the social-media service, openly reprimanding him.
On Sunday, Eric Fraunhofer, an engineer who worked on Twitter’s app for the Android mobile operating system, reposted one of Musk’s tweets with a comment that Musk had a poor understanding of the technical part of the Twitter app. Before writing asked to elaborate on super slow on Android what have you done to fix it.
After attempting to explain his thinking in several tweets, Fraunhofer was asked by another user why he had not shared his response privately with his new boss. The engineer, who has worked at Twitter for more than eight years, replied that perhaps he should ask questions in private, perhaps using Slack or email.
On Monday morning, Musk wrote that Fraunhofer had been fired. Fraunhofer retweeted that post and included a saluting emoji that was used by several employees when they were laid off earlier this month. did not immediately respond to requests for comment on his condition.
Another engineer, Ben Lieb, was fired after Musk was called in. As the former tech lead of Timeline Infrastructure on Twitter, I can confidently say this guy, retweeting the same tech post from Musk. has no idea what he’s talking about, Leib, who worked at Twitter for a decade, confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday.
Twitter has been in chaos since Musk took office late last month. Many employees are upset that Musk fired half of the company’s more than 7,000 employees, including most senior managers, within nearly a week of his $44 billion buyout.
The billionaire also rapidly changed the corporate culture. While it was not previously routine for employees to publicly challenge leadership on Twitter, employees often spoke before Musk was exposed on internal Slack channels and by email, sometimes posting criticisms or concerns of the entire company.
Current and former employees say Musk’s changes have led to a lack of communication internally about who’s in charge and what the company’s priorities are. The move has also raised concerns that the San Francisco-based Twitter product could be broken or technical glitches emerge. is vulnerable. On Monday, Twitter implemented another coding freeze, halting product updates to the app and not giving employees a clear reason.