Elon Musk publicly fires two employees who called him out online

Elon Musk has reportedly fired two company engineers who'd publicly criticised him on the social media service.

Ever since the billionaire acquired the social media service last month for $44 billion, he has introduced a bunch of changes, which included firing up to half of its workforce, as per CBS News.

Now, the Tesla CEO has found himself in a very public back and forth with an employee over Twitter’s Android mobile app.

Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer, who worked on the Twitter Android mobile operating system, shared a tweet on Sunday (13 November) stating that Musk’s understanding of the technical aspect of Twitter’s app was ‘wrong’.

Frohnhoefer spoke out after Musk apologised for the ‘super slow’ performance of the company’s app.

“Btw, I’d like to apologise for Twitter being super slow in many countries,” the 51-year-old tweeted. “App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”

However, Frohnhoefer quote-tweeted Musk’s apology and publicly disagreed, writing: “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”

Twitter.

Musk was apparently not happy about this public outing and wrote in response: “Then please correct me. What is the right number?” while adding, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”

Frohnhoefer then shared a laundry list of issues and potential fixes for the app’s issues, as one tweet reads: “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.”

Twitter.

Twitter.

After explaining what he thought the issues were in a series of public tweets, a Twitter user asked Frohnhoefer why he hadn’t shared this information with Musk privately. He then replied: “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.”

Musk wrote: “The fact that you don’t realize that there are up to 1200 'microservices' being called when someone uses the Twitter app is not great.”

Twitter..

However, the situation seemed to take a dramatic turn on Monday (14 November) when Musk announced that Frohnhoefer had been fired, simply tweeting: “He’s fired”.

Frohnhoefer, who worked for Twitter for eight years, posted the salute emoji in response, which many employees had used when they were laid off earlier this month.

UNILAD has reached out to Frohnhoefer and Twitter for comment.

Another Twitter engineer, Ben Leib, was also reportedly fired after calling out Musk and the app’s technical problems on Twitter.

Leib retweeted the same technical post from Musk and added: “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.”

Leib had worked at Twitter for a decade however this all came to an end on not long after the tweet. He then confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday.