'He's fired': Elon Musk fires software engineer via tweet for questioning his claims

Tesla CEO Elon Musk who recently acquired the microblogging site Twitter has again made headlines after he ‘fired’ an employee via a tweet. Amid the job cuts in the social media company, Musk seemed to fire another member of his Twitter staff, via a tweet saying, “He’s fired”. This incident took place on Monday after the worker contested him online. Taking to Twitter, software developer Eric Frohnhoefer expressed his disagreement with Musk after the new Twitter owner had apologized for the slowness of the Twitter app on Android phones. 

Referring to Frohnhoefer’s comment, several users tagged Musk in the tweet, and following that the newly appointed CEO simply commented, "He's fired." 

It all started when Elon Musk apologised to the Twitter user saying, “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!” 

Further, citing Musk’s tweet, Frohnhoefer wrote, “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.” 

Elon Musk replies to software developer's disagreement

Continuing to the online squabble, the world's richest man then asked, “Then please correct me. What is the right number?” and in a subsequent tweet, he said, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?” 

Additionally, software developer Eric Frohnhoefer said replying to the question, “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 even explained the reasons behind the slowness of the Twitter app on Android phones. 

In the meantime, Twitter has not acknowledged whether or not the developer was truly fired. However, sources told the Daily Beast that Frohnhoefer's Twitter Slack profile was deactivated on Monday. Furthermore, as per his LinkedIn profile, Frohnhoefer served Twitter for eight years. He also posted a picture of a locked laptop screen along with a caption, "Guess it is official now," implying that he may have actually been fired, Daily Mail reported. 

This event occurred while Musk has already started laying off a significant number of Twitter employees after promising to dismiss up to 75% of his team. Musk has let go of a number of staff members, including the board of directors as well as the CEO Parag Agrawal and chief financial officer Ned Legal. 

(Image: AP/ Unsplash)