‘Photos of Twitter data engineers fired’: This is what Elon Musk has to say – Times of India

Twitter is now the Elon Musk company. Just hours after Musk took over Twitter, he reportedly fired the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal, policy chief Vijaya Gadde, chief financial officer Ned Segal and general counsel Sean Edgett. Amid Musk’s Twitter takeover, some videos started circulating claiming that lay offs have started at Twitter and an entire team of product data engineers has been fired. The video had two men carrying boxes standing near the entrance to Twitter’s San Francisco building. These men claimed to have been laid off by Elon Musk. The news was also covered by several publications.
The Verge debunked the viral videos in a report. It said that there are some big loopholes in the response of these two men. The most glaring is that one man identifies himself as a software engineer named “Rahul Ligma”. “The Verge has confirmed that name does not exist in Twitter’s Slack or email system. There is also no evidence that the employee exists on LinkedIn,” added the report. Musk has signaled that he will in fact lay off employees, but those photographed outside the Twitter headquarters with boxes are surely not the ones.
As the videos went viral, Elon Musk too had some witty reaction to the whole episode. “Ligma Johnson had it coming,” tweeted Musk.

Musk’s tweet was in reference to one of the pranksters who said that his name was “Rahul Ligma” — a reference to a popular internet meme — and held a copy of Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming” aloft while speaking to reporters. The other said his name was “Daniel Johnson.”
Paul Lee, a product manager at Twitter, was among those who called out the popular media organisation over its report.

“Quite ironic that a major news outlet failed to do basic diligence and fell for a crisis actor prank, resulting in the spread of misinfo, on the first day of new ownership,” Lee tweeted. “All you had to do was ask to see a badge or look for bird-themed stuff in the boxes. Also, we don’t use Zoom.”