Twitter was all a-flutter Tuesday after a beef between a San Diego-based employee and the world's richest man ($185 billion, as of Monday, per Bloomberg).
If you just woke from a coma, you may not be aware that Elon Musk bought the social media platform Twitter last month for $44 billion and a media frenzy has been on blast ever since. Shortly after the purchase, he dissolved the company’s board of directors and dismissed many top executives, then laid off about half of the company's workforce, including outsourced contractors who are tasked with fighting misinformation and other harmful content.
Anyway, back to the twit spat: Sunday, around 10 a.m., @elonmusk tweeted, "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!"
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Now, we're not engineers over here, but we've seen this explained in several published reports as an apology directed at how slow the app was working for Android Twitter users.
Since its posting, Musk's tweet has garnered nearly 11,000 retweets and almost 165,000 likes.
A little over three hours later, @EricFrohnhoefer replied to the tweet, saying: "I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong."
The reply was retweeted more than 8,000 times and was liked by nearly 140,000 as of press time.
(We had to ask, too: "~" means "approximately.")
NBC7 has reached out to Frohnhoefer regarding this story but has not yet heard from him.
His LinkedIn bio lists him as a San Diego resident who is an "accomplished software engineer currently specializing in Android development. Focused on delivering delight by listening to customers, shipping iteratively and thinking big." According to the profile, he began work at Twitter in August 2014, after leaving a role at Raytheon.
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And here's more of that engineer-speak: "As part of Fabric team, help create Digits for Android, an SDK that enabled simple phone-based authentication for app developers. Later lead development of Twitter Kit for Android, an SDK that allows developers to easily include Twitter content in their application."
But we digress.
In a follow-up Twitter exchange, Musk asked Frohnhoefer "to explain himself," as the VOSD put it.
"Then please correct me. What is the right number?" Musk tweeted, followed by, "Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?"
The VOSD, Mediaite and Forbes reported that Musk later told another Tweeter that Frohnhoefer had been canned. That claim is hard to check — a link to that Tweet states, "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."
What is acknowledged by Frohnhoefer himself is that he no longer works for Twitter. As of Tuesday, his Twitter profile states, "San Diegan of the year. Android developer open to new opportunities. No crypto nonsense. Formerly @twitter." In his profile photo, he's shown at Petco decked out in Padres gear, including a Slam Diego swag chain necklace.
Forbes reportedly spoke with the San Diego engineer on Monday afternoon, posting that "the engineer said he had received no formal communications from the company at all about his sudden dismissal. 'Nope, nothing,' he said. 'They’re all a bunch of cowards.' "
The Associated Press contributed to this report — Ed.
