Elon Musk has allegedly embarked on a brutal crackdown against Twitter employees who have spoken out against him online and internally.
The new Twitter boss came under fire after mass layoffs that saw him jettison half the company’s staff at short notice.
Since then, he has launched and backtracked on a number of features, including the Twitter Blue subscription service which immediately ran into problems as it allowed anyone to impersonate any company or individual they wanted.
This included one episode that reportedly saw a few fake tweets erase billions from the stock value of company Eli Lilly.
Now the South African-born entrepreneur has seemingly been lashing out, firing Twitter employees who have spoken out against him online, criticising him or pushing back on some of his claims.
Whilst the exact numbers are unknown, the Mirror understands upwards of eight and possibly as many as a dozen employees have been fired for comments they made online, criticising Musk or pushing back against comments he made slamming Twitter.
Eric Frohnhoefer, one such employee, took to Twitter to reply to some of his new boss’ tweets that highlighted issues leading to Twitter being ‘super slow in many countries’.
The now former-Twitter employee said that Elon’s claims the app was “doing" 1,000 poorly batched RPCs [remote procedure calls] just to render a home timeline” were wrong and after the ensuing conversation, the Twitter employee was fired seemingly as a result.
He was far from the only one. Other employees were also let go by Musk for either speaking out publicly, on the platform, and reportedly internally as well.
In response to Eric’s firing, a number of employees spoke out publicly, either replying to or quote tweeting the responses.
One now previous software engineer at Twitter quote tweeted Musk and said: “You did not just layoff almost all of infra and then make some sassy remark about how we do batching
“Like did you bother to even learn how graphql works. You don’t get to s*** on our infra if you don’t know what the f*** it does while you’re also scrambling to rehire folks you laid off.”
As a result of her remarks she was seemingly let go less than a day later. She added: “Lol I just got fired for s***posting.”
Another was similarly let go because their “recent behaviour has violated company policy” alluding to comments they had made but they insisted they had no clue what it specifically referred to.
A third signed off as well simply saying: “Looks like I just got fired for s***posting too!”
A number of other Twitter employees echoed this, saying similar things happened to them as well and one raised the prospect of the firings being used to cover another round of layoffs.
The bizarre practice of Musk comes soon after his $44billion acquisition of the company following legal proceedings.
He has seemingly clamped down on any employees speaking out publicly against him or criticising him.
Whilst some were openly critical of Musk, others simply pushed back against his claims - some of which have been fact-checked by his own website.
The employees were let go via email and which read: “Hi. We regret to inform you that your employment has been terminated effective immediately. Your recent behaviour has violated company policy.
"Our operations team will be reaching out to you with offboarding instructions. If you have any follow up questions you can email alum@twitter.com”.
The Platformer report that a further 20 employees have been let go for their Slack posts, internally.
The site also highlighted that Twitter had long cultivated a culture of fearless communication internally - something Musk’s actions go against.
Earlier this year, when Musk first broached buying Twitter, he said: “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means”.
But this is far from the first time Musk lashed out at someone after they criticised him online.
Back in 2016, Elon Musk personally cancelled a blogger’s Tesla after they were critical of him, writing about a badly run launch event.
The Mirror has approached Twitter for comment but understands the company’s press team was laid off in the first round of sackings.
