Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Monday fired a Twitter employee, Eric Frohnhoefer, who argued with him on the microblogging platform Musk recently acquired for $44 billion. The war of words began with one of Musk’s tweets wherein he apologized for Twitter being slow in “many countries” explaining the reason for the same. One of the Twitter engineers, who claimed to be working on the app for the past six years called out Musk. In one of the following tweets, Musk wrote, “He’s fired”.
On Sunday, Musk tweeted, “Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”
Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
To this, Frohnhoefer responded and said, “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”
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
What followed is a bunch of tweets spread over many threads and hours. Several other users also got involved in the conversation and one of them asked whether the Twitter employee should have not confronted Musk on Twitter about the issue. The final verdict came in with Musk’s tweet wherein he wrote, “He’s fired”. Later on, Frohnhoefer tweeted that he was “definitely stupid” to publicly correct his boss’s mistake and also posted a picture of his MacBook on Twitter which showed that his laptop was locked by the “Administrator” implying that he indeed had been fired.
Musk, in his concluding tweet, said that the “ex-employee is wrong”. “I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong.”
In just a few weeks after Musk’s takeover, Twitter has been hit by a massive wave of changes. First, top executives like the CEO and CFO were sacked, then around 50 percent of the company’s employees were laid off, and now the structure of the micro-blogging platform that appealed to millions of its users is undergoing a chaotic overhaul.
