Elon Musk fires people who don’t reply to his emails. Photo: Shutterstock
A former Twitter employee who was wrongfully fired for failing to respond to an email from CEO Elon Musk asking employees to be “extremely hardcore” has received nearly $1 million in damages.
Earlier this week, Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission ordered Company X, formerly known as Twitter, to pay former senior employee Gary Rooney $907,000 (€550,000) for unfair dismissal, the largest compensation award in the country’s history, The Guardian reported.
The suit relates to emails sent in late 2022 by Musk, who had just completed his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform at the time.
The email, sent to 270 Twitter employees in Ireland at the time, outlined Musk’s vision for the company.
“Going forward, we need to get extremely hardcore to build a revolutionary Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world,” Musk said in an email to employees.
“This means working at high intensity for long periods of time. Only exceptional performance will earn a passing grade.”
The email asked employees to click “yes” within 24 hours to confirm their consent to the new version of Twitter.
Those who did not accept this are believed to have resigned and offered three months’ severance pay.
Looney, who was Twitter’s head of procure-to-pay, did not respond to Musk’s email, but received an email three days later acknowledging Musk’s “decision to resign” and confirming that he had accepted his offer to resign.
Rooney disputed this in an email a week later, saying, “I never communicated my resignation via Twitter, nor have I seen or accepted a separation agreement.”
Rooney took his case to the Irish Workplace Relations Commission, arguing that he was unfairly fired and that his failure to respond to Musk’s emails did not amount to voluntary dismissal.
“No.”
During a five-day hearing into the case, Lauren Wegman, Twitter’s senior director of human resources, said that 35 of the 270 Irish employees who received the email did not click “yes,” essentially resigning from the company.
But that was rejected by European Commission examiner Michael McNamee, who found that the 24-hour deadline set out in Musk’s email was not “reasonable” and that Looney’s failure to respond within the time frame could not be considered as him resigning.
The commission ordered Twitter to pay Rooney $577,000 (€350,131) in lost wages from January 2023 to May 2024, as well as $330,000 (€200,000) in lost future earnings.
Rooney’s lawyer, Barry Kenny, commented on the ruling: [his] “My client did not resign, she was wrongfully fired.”
“It is unacceptable for Musk, or any large company in this country, to treat their employees like this.
“The record amount of the award reflects the seriousness and gravity of this case,” Kenney said.
Shortly after taking over at Twitter, Musk took the step of laying off around 4,000 employees around the world.
These cuts included cutting the company’s safety engineers by about 80 percent and its public policy staff worldwide by about 80 percent.
In July 2023, Twitter will officially rebrand as X, as Musk pursues his dream of making the platform “the app for everything.”