Musk at a 2022 Halloween party.
Taylor Hill/Getty Images
An engineer at Twitter publicly disagreed with Elon Musk about the app’s performance on Android devices.
In response, Musk tweeted that Eric Frohnhoefer, who worked at Twitter for more than 6 years, would be fired.
Hours later, Frohnhoefer posted a picture of his locked out work laptop, saying “guess it is official now.”
A day after publicly disagreeing with new Twitter owner Elon Musk about the social platform’s performance on Android devices, software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer has been fired.
Musk and Frohnhoefer sparred on Twitter on Sunday after the new owner posted he’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!” Musk tweeted as an explanation, to which Frohnhoefer — who worked as a software engineer at Twitter for over 6 years — replied saying Musk was “wrong.”
Musk then challenged the engineer to explain what he’d done to improve Twitter’s performance on Android devices, which spurred public comments that Frohnhoefer should be terminated. Frohnhoefer detailed his work and the areas for potential improvement in a longer thread, which Musk did not interact with.
—Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Instead, in response to one user who commented on Frohnhoefer’s attitude and told Musk “you probably don’t want this guy on your team,” Musk tweeted simply “He’s fired.”
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
About six hours later, Frohnhoefer tweeted a photo of his locked out work computer, saying “guess it is official now.”
—Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
This is the most recent public layoff amongst a host of layoffs that Musk has conducted ever since he took over Twitter as its chief executive. Just over the weekend, Musk laid off Twitter’s contract staff, with some affected employees saying they weren’t given proper notice of impending layoffs.
Frohnhoefer and Musk’s heated exchange on Twitter is not the first time the billionaire has publicly parried with the social platform’s staffers. On Monday, Musk and a former Twitter employee clashed over the cost of Twitter’s free lunch program when he said the estimated cost per lunch served in the past 12 months exceeded $400.
Musk, Twitter and Frohnhoefer did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.