Despite praising freedom of expression, Elon Musk fires Twitter engineers who criticize him online
Twitter owner Elon Musk, who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist,” has resorted to firing company engineers who publicly criticize him on the social media service.
In one instance, Musk announced the layoff in a tweet. In another, the former employee said he was fired after openly rebuking Musk.
Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer, who worked on the Twitter app for the Android mobile operating system, published one of Musk’s tweets on Sunday with a comment saying Musk had a “misunderstanding” of a technical part of the Twitter app. Musk responded and asked Frohnhoefer to elaborate, before writing, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What did you do to fix that?”
After trying to explain his thinking in several tweets, another user asked Frohnhöfer why he hadn’t shared his feedback privately with his new boss. The engineer, who has worked at Twitter for more than eight years, replied: “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.”
Musk wrote on Monday morning that Frohnhöfer had been fired. Frohnhoefer retweeted this post and added: salute Emoji used by many employees when they were laid off earlier this month. Twitter and Frohnhöfer did not immediately respond to requests for comment on his status.
Another engineer, Ben Leib, was also fired after calling Musk. He retweeted the same tech post by Musk, in which he writes, “As a former tech lead for Twitter’s Timelines infrastructure, I can say with confidence that this man 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 over late last month. Many workers remain angry that Musk fired half of the company’s 7,000-plus employees, including most of its senior executives, within about a week of his $44 billion acquisition.
The billionaire also quickly changed the corporate culture. While it wasn’t previously common for employees to publicly challenge leadership on Twitter, employees often took to internal Slack channels and email before Musk surfaced, sometimes posting criticism or concerns to the entire company.
Musk’s changes have led to a lack of internal communication about who’s in charge and what the company’s priorities are, current and former employees say.
The moves have also raised concerns that San Francisco-based Twitter is vulnerable to product or technical failures. On Monday, Twitter implemented another coding freeze and halted product updates for the app, and no clear reason was given to staff.
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