Elon Musk fires engineer who publicly called out Musk and his lies about Twitter's performance

Elon Musk has had a rather difficult time running Twitter ever since he bought Twitter and took control. To say things have been messy ever since he took control of Twitter would be an understatement. Musk has a habit of airing some of the internal issues of Twitter on the social media platform for his followers. Well, one such public airing, did not go as well as he had hoped it would.

Elon Musk recently took to Twitter, complaining that the app was slow in a number of countries and that he apologises for it. His main contention was that the app loaded much quicker in some countries, and slower in others.

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!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022

Eric Frohnhoefer, an engineer working with Twitter, called him out, saying that he was working on Twitter for Android for over 6 years and that what Musk was claiming, wasn’t true.

I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong. https://t.co/sh30ZxpD0N

— Eric Frohnhoefer (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 13, 2022

Musk retorted saying that Twitter on Android is extremely slow, and what did he (Frohnhoefer) do about it.

Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022

Frohnhoefer, in his response over multiple Tweets, laid out why exactly Twitter was slow on Android. He also took a cheeky dig, saying that one of the reasons why Twitter was slow on certain Android devices was because of the number of unnecessary features that practically no one used.

When someone pointed out that instead of replying to Elon on a public forum like Twitter, he should explain all these things privately. To this, Frohnhoefer had an epic reply, saying that maybe, Musk should ask questions privately, using Slack or email, instead of putting out statements on Twitter.

Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email. 🤷‍♂️

— Eric Frohnhoefer (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022

Ben Lieb, a previously fired Twitter engineer, also retweeted the same post from Musk and wrote, “As the former tech leads for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about”. Lieb worked at Twitter for a decade before he was fired by the new CEO.  

On Monday, Musk confirmed that he had fired Eric, in reply to one of the users on Twitter. Eric retweeted Musk’s post with a saluting emoji, which was used by many employees when they were laid off earlier this month.

🫡 https://t.co/YpaQysrIv0

— Eric Frohnhoefer (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022

Both Twitter and Eric didn’t comment immediately about his status in the company, but Eric later tweeted a post in which his access to his office account was blocked by Twitter.

Guess it is official now. pic.twitter.com/5SRwotyD8J

— Eric Frohnhoefer (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022

Ever since Musk took over Twitter there has been a mass exodus of key personnel from the company. Apart from the thousands of employees who were terminated from Twitter, by Musk’s team of Tesla and SpaceX engineers who have been bought to manage Twitter, several people have also resigned on their own accord.