Eric Frohnhoefer is the latest addition to the list of Twitter employees fired by Elon Musk since his takeover as CEO of Social Media Platform, Twitter.
Gatekeepers News reports that Elon Musk appeared to fire the Twitter developer in a tweet on Monday after the employee contradicted him online.
The incident began when Musk apologized via a tweet for the speed of the Twitter app on Android devices, and then software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer sent off a tweet saying he disagreed with Musk.
Musk was tagged in Frohnhoefer’s tweet by other users, and the new Twitter CEO responded bluntly “He’s fired.”
Although Twitter has not confirmed if Frohnhoefer was actually sacked, his Slack account within Twitter was offline on Monday.
Frohnhoefer, himself tweeted a photo of a locked laptop screen and wrote ‘Guess it is official now,’ suggesting he may have truly been canned.
The incident comes as Musk has already begun to cut scores of jobs at Twitter after vowing to fire up to seventy-five percent of his staff.
On Sunday afternoon Musk sent off a seemingly innocuous tweet about the Twitter app’s speed in different countries.
‘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 wrote.
Frohnhoefer, who worked on Twitter’s Android team openly disagreed saying,
‘I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.’ he tweeted.
Musk responded by insisting Twitter was slow on Android and asking Frohnhoefer what he did to fix it during his time with the social media company.
‘Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?’ he wrote.
Frohnhoefer replied with a list of things he’s done at work, along with his assessment of what might be causing the slowdowns.
Some Twitter users chimed in and admonished Frohnhoefer for disagreeing with his boss in such a public forum.
‘I have been a developer for 20 years. And I can tell you that as the domain expert here you should inform your boss privately. Trying to one up him in public while he is trying to learn and be helpful makes you look like a spiteful self serving dev.’ a user wrote.
Frohnhoefer responded by suggesting that Musk do the same thing.
‘Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email,’ he wrote.
On Monday, a third user tagged Musk in the tweet chain and wrote ‘with this kind of attitude, you probably don’t want this guy on your team.’
Musk responded within the hour, announcing ‘he’s fired.’
Frohnhoefer then replied to Musk with a saluting emoji.
Musk has been a subject of a lot of criticisms since acquiring Twitter.
On Monday, via a video broadcast, Musk appeared at the B20 summit in Brazil and admitted that “it’s a little uncomfortable” being a media mogul.
‘It’s a little uncomfortable, Twitter is sort of media but it’s not exactly media. It is a medium as opposed to media.”
‘But I mean, there’s no way to make everyone happy, that’s for sure.’
