A Twitter employee, fired through a tweet after criticizing Elon Musk, slammed the billionaire and his advisors as “a bunch of cowards” Monday night.
Former Twitter software engineer Eric Fronhofer received a public pink slip after he engaged in a war of words with Musk on the platform.
The row began after Musk tweeted an apology on Sunday “for Twitter being slow in many countries” and attributed the problem to the app’s poor functionality.
Frohnhoefer responded to Musk: “I’ve been working on Twitter for Android for about 6 years and I can say that’s wrong.” His tweet has received more than 133,000 likes since it was posted.
“Then please correct me. What is the correct number?” Musk replied. “Twitter is too slow on Android. What did you do to fix that?”
Frohnhoefer responded with a long thread explaining his view on Twitter’s slow performance
“I think there are three reasons for the slow implementation,” Fronhofer said. “First, it’s bloated with features that get little use. Second, we’ve accumulated years of tech debt where we’ve traded speed and features for performance. Third, we spend a lot of time waiting for network responses.”
Musk didn’t respond to the thread, but later confirmed that he had fired Fronhofer with a two-word tweet: “He’s fired.” Twitter CEO The post has since been deleted.
By Monday night, Frohnhoefer posted a photo showing he was locked out of his company’s laptop.
“I think it’s official now,” he added.
When Reached out by Forbes for commentFrohnhoefer said he did not receive any communication from Twitter about the shooting before locking his computer.
He said, “No, nothing.” “They’re all bunch of cowards.”
Frohnhoefer was fired despite surviving the first round of layoffs Musk ordered earlier this month. Twitter has cut about half of its workforce of 7,500 employees as Musk aimed to cut costs at the struggling social media site.
Musk also ended Twitter’s remote work policy and canceled free lunches he claimed were It costs the company $13 million a year.
Frohnhoefer had worked at Twitter for about eight years before he was fired, according to his LinkedIn page. His role is listed as a ‘Staff Software Engineer’.
The ousted engineer told Forbes that Twitter has gone “downhill” since Musk took over the company in October.
“No one inside the company trusts anyone anymore,” Fronhofer said. “How can you operate? Employees don’t trust the new management. Management doesn’t trust the employees. How do you think you’re supposed to get anything done? That’s why there are production freezes — you can’t merge code, you can’t run things without the permission of the VPs.”
The Post has reached out to Frohnhoefer and Twitter for comment.
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