- A Twitter engineer said he believed he was fired for criticizing Elon Musk on Slack.
- He said he'd have come up with "way cleverer and more devastating jokes" if he'd have known his fate.
A fired Twitter engineer said he would have come up with "way cleverer and more devastating jokes" about new owner Elon Musk if he'd have known he'd be fired.
After laying off around half of the company's workforce, Musk has been firing workers for criticizing him and his leadership of Twitter either on the platform or in Slack messages, leading to some workers reportedly removing their posts out of fear for their jobs.
One current employee previously told Insider the firings seemed to target many people in an internal Slack channel called Social Watercooler, which has around 2,000 members and has long been used by staff to chatter and criticize the company.
Daniel Fletcher, who appeared to be a software engineer at Twitter, tweeted on November 15: "I've been fired for unspecified recent behavior in violation of unnamed company policy i.e. hanging out in the #social-watercooler."
He had also retweeted some posts that were critical of Musk's leadership, including one by since-fired Twitter engineer Benjamin Leib who said that Musk "has no idea wtf he's talking about."
On Friday, Fletcher posted a thread commemorating his time at the social-media giant. As well as discussing his job and praising his colleagues, he commented on the jokes he believed led to his layoffs.
"if I had known I would be fired for participating in the 1200 RPC discussion or for making fun of Elon in slack (who knows? we were never told!) then I would have come up with way cleverer and more devastating jokes," Fletcher tweeted.
"I mean, c'mon Elon we were just horsing around."
"The 1200 RPC discussion" refers to a tweet by Musk where he apologized for the app's "super slow" performance. Leib and two other engineers said they were fired after publicly criticizing the tweet.
"I had the honor of working on the 2022 US #ElectionSquad (which was decimated in the thanos snap) and was in the middle of building a generic system for harmful media detection when the axe found me late Monday night," Fletcher said.
Twitter staff have been jokingly referring to Musk's layoffs as "the Thanos snap," referencing the Marvel character who destroyed half of the universe by snapping his fingers.
"I had meant to spend my whole career at Twitter," Fletcher added.
After Musk took control of Twitter, both current and laid-off employees were quick to post tweets mocking or criticizing the tech mogul, spawning dozens of memes.
In addition to the mass layoffs and targeted firings, dozens of Twitter workers have also been opting to leave the company. Many of these came in the form of voluntary layoffs after Musk outlined his vision for "Twitter 2.0" and told workers they would need to be "extremely hardcore" and work "long hours at high intensity."
A person familiar with the company's processes told Insider's Kali Hays that less than half of the company's remaining roughly 4,000 employees chose to stay at the company.
"I bet that millennia of domain knowledge and expertise opted to leave Twitter today. Let THAT sink in," Fletcher tweeted, referring to how Musk brought a sink into Twitter HQ the day before his deal to buy the platform went through.