Tweet Shocker! "He's FIRED"; in horror move, Elon Musk sacks Twitter employee over spat

Twitter has been on a rollercoaster ride ever since the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, took charge of the platform. On the first day of his takeover, he fired top executives including former CEO Parag Agrawal and legal head Vijaya Gadde. In days to follow, he conducted a mass layoff on the platform letting go of nearly 3,700 employees globally that also saw the entire Twitter India marketing team being sacked. Now, in a shocking move, the Twitter CEO has fired an engineer after he questioned Musk over his tweet. Check the details below.

On November 13, Musk tweeted an apology for the slowdown of the platform and said, “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”. He also explained that the Twitter app in the US takes ~2 secs to refresh, but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms.

Twitter app developer questions Elon Musk over his tweet

Eric Frohnhoefer, who claimed to be working on Twitter for Android replied to the tweet by Musk expressing his disagreement. He said, “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong”.

Calling out his boss publicly on the social media platform did not go down well with Musk who replied to him by saying, “Then please correct me. What is the right number?”. He also questioned the employee on the platform asking, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”.

In a series of tweets, Frohnhoefer replied to Musk answering his questions. He said, “We have done a bunch of work to improve performance and we found that it correlates well with increasing UAM and Ad spend. Agree, there is plenty of room for performance improvements on Android. However, I don’t think the number of requests is the primary issue.”

He continued, “For a cold start of the app there are ~20 requests to load home timeline. Most of the requests are non-blocking and happen in the background. This includes things like images, user settings, hashflags, etc. I think there are three reasons the app is slow. First it’s bloated with features that get little usage. Second, we have accumulated years of tech debt as we have traded velocity and features over perf. Third, we spend a lot of time waiting for network responses”.

While Musk did not respond to the tweets publicly, several hours later he replied to another tweet which suggested that the CEO should not let his employee display insubordination publicly and take a step against him. That tweet has been deleted by the user now. Replying to it, Musk revealed, “He’s fired”.

Meanwhile, Frohnhoefer has apparently taken this on the chin. In a tweet posted after the revelation that he was fired, he said, “Probably should have just called in sick”. He also answered another user who suggested that he should have responded to the Twitter chief privately and said, “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email”.