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Twitter Engineer Publicly 'Fired' After Trying to One-Up His Boss, Elon Musk

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Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.

The degree to which a worker can successfully go toe-to-toe with the boss varies from workplace to workplace, but based on what took place last week, it would be safe to assume publicly confronting Twitter owner Elon Musk is not a good approach in terms of job security.

It began with Musk apologizing for Twitter being slow in some countries, then turned into the spectacle of Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer disagreeing with Musk — all this taking place on Twitter over the course of hours.

It ended with a Muskian variant of former President Donald Trump’s signature line from “The Apprentice” with Musk writing, “He’s fired.”

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For those without a clue what the technobabble meant, The Verge has an explanation.

Musk’s apology “implied that the poor performance is because the app does over 1,000 ‘poorly batched’ remote procedure calls to load the home timeline — basically saying the app has to reach out to other servers a bunch of times and wait for a response for each request,” it wrote.

Frohnhoefer not only disagreed but went on to explain in depth how wrong the boss was, defying those voices that suggested it was not the wisest of courses to follow.

Frohnhoefer and Musk then went back and forth — all in public — disagreeing over the nature and extent of the problem. Musk at one point asked the engineer what he has done to fix a problem with Twitter on Android.

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“You probably don’t want this guy on your team,” one user wrote.

Eventually, the debate came to a close, with a two-word tweet from Musk: “He’s fired.”

Frohnhoefer noted that he has since received other employment offers.

The episode left Twitter users debating the wisdom of what Musk did, with some saying, “This genius in action is rarely seen publicly,” and others less thrilled.

Musk purchased Twitter in late October, and since then has fired about half of Twitter’s employees while shaking up much of Twitter’s internal operations.

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Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Jack can be reached at jackwritings1@gmail.com.
Location
New York City
Languages Spoken
English
Topics of Expertise
Politics, Foreign Policy, Military & Defense Issues




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