Halloween may be over, but the clown behavior never stops.
And today, the spotlight shines on one iconic billionaire: Elon Musk
Tweeting a Termination
On Tuesday (15 Nov), following a public online argument between one employee and the new boss of Twitter over the company’s poor experience for Android users, Musk decisively decided to dismiss the said employee.
Not with a proper exit, but rather, through a tweet.
According to internal Slack messages obtained by CNBC, Eric Frohnoefer, who had worked at Twitter for more than eight years, allegedly did not receive a formal notice of his termination prior to or at the time Musk tweeted about it.
Like a boss, Frohnhoefer quote-tweeted Musk’s “fired” tweet on the same day and included a salute emoji, a move that was done by other numerous current and former Twitter employees throughout the recent layoffs.
Musk’s tweet has since been deleted, but Frohnhoefer still kept his.
And it appears that the team wasted no time moving in accordance with the big boss’s demands, because in the evening, Frohnoefer was locked out of his work computer ASAP.
What Were They Arguing About?
Musk had tweeted an apology in response to Twitter being “super slow in certain countries”. He attributed the slowness to “poorly batched RPCs,” or remote process phone calls. He added that 80 percent of the microservices that power various parts of Twitter are unnecessary and will be turned off.
These were ultimately excuses that showed that he actually has a complete lack of understanding of how Twitter functioned.
This was when Frohnhoefer stepped in and refute Musk’s explanation.
In a Twitter thread that is now deleted, Frohnhoefer explained the actual reasons behind Twitter being slow.
Luckily, someone else had managed to screenshot the exchange:
Obviously, Musk was not happy about a professional with the appropriate knowledge correcting him, so he did what he did best: firing him.
Never Ending Fiasco
Another employee being lay off is probably another day for the people working at Twitter.
Ever since Musk took over leadership of the business late last month, about 50 percent of its employees were let go, with the majority from communications, content curation, human rights, and machine learning ethics.
Funny enough, short after the mass layoff, the company had reached out to dozens of employees who were fired, citing that some were actually laid off by mistake.
Recently, he implemented a new Twitter Blue Subscription service that charges account holders with the verified blue tick $8 per month.
The $8 charge didn’t do any damage to the wallet of these account holders. Rather, it affect the authenticity of these accounts, as faked “verified accounts in the names of politicians, celebrities, major organisations, and business started appearing on the platform
Just last week, the big pharmacy company Eli Lily faced a drop in stocks because of a fake blue check tweet that promised insulin to be free for all.
The fake account has since lost its verified check mark and switched to private, but of course not without some sick damage.
Featured Image: Instagram (@elonrmuskk)