Elon Musk fires Twitter employees for criticizing him

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A Twitter engineer was publicly fired days after he criticized Elon Musk. The move came less than three weeks after Musk acquired Twitter, which he had promised to turn into a safe haven for free expression, saying users should be “able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”  

Key Players

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact via so-called tweets. As of 2022, Twitter had nearly 400 million users worldwide. Over the years, the platform has received degrees of backlash from all parts of the political spectrum, including accusations of censorship and spreading disinformation. 

Elon Musk, a South African American entrepreneur and investor, is the CEO and owner of Twitter, an acquisition he completed in October 2022. He is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, a space exploration enterprise, and Tesla, an electric vehicle company. In June 2022, he was considered the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $211 billion, but was later displaced from that perch. 

Eric Frohnhoefer worked as a Twitter software engineer specializing in the development of Android operating systems for six years prior to Musk’s becoming CEO. 

Further Details

A self-proclaimed “Free Speech absolutist,” Musk has been criticized for his management of Twitter, including inconsistent enforcement of its terms of service, a spike in hate speech, a mass firing of employees, and censorship. 

On Nov. 13, Musk tweeted that Twitter had been running faster since his takeover.

Immediately, Frohnhoefer publicly tweeted to Musk, replying “wrong.” When Musk replied, asking him to elaborate, Frohnhoefer tweeted, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”

“He’s fired,” Musk replied the next day. Frohnhoefer then tweeted back with a salute emoji, a symbol that many fired or resigned employees have used amid the Musk takeover. 

Ben Leib, who worked as a Twitter engineer for nearly a decade before Musk’s arrival, replied to the thread. “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about,” he tweeted, referring to Musk. He was promptly fired as well. 

Other employees who criticized Musk faced similar consequences. Casey Newton, a writer at Platform, a technology publication, reported that 20 engineers who spoke out against Musk in a Twitter Slack channel were fired via email. One former employee shared a screenshot of the email, which simply stated, “your recent behavior has violated company policy.”

Outcome

Critics condemn Musk for ongoing hostility and censorship 

Many journalists and Free Speech advocates criticized Musk’s continuous retaliation against employees who speak out. 

“Before the first round of layoffs, employees were reminding each other to keep their heads down and out of the way of Musk. If they got laid off, they’d get severance. But if they pushed back against Elon? They’d get fired. No severance. Very normal work environment,” NBC News reporter Ben Collins tweeted. 

Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a Free Speech nonprofit, said Musk had abused the term “free speech.” 

“He seems to shift from free-speech absolutism until he decides he doesn’t like something,” said Corbin Barthold, an appellate lawyer for Tech Freedom, a nonpartisan think tank, The New York Times reported. 

Twitter has not been the only Musk-owned company accused of censoring employees. 

In February 2022, former Tesla employee John Bernal was fired after he expressed concern with the company’s autopilot feature in a video on his private YouTube channel. The only explanation given for his termination was that he had violated company policy.

That month, the state of California sued Tesla over racial discrimination and harassment against employees.