Twitter employee sacked for not replying to Musk electronic mail receives payout
A Twitter worker who has been sacked for failing to reply to an Elon Musk email calling on staff to be ‘extremely hardcore’ has received a £470,000 payout.
Gary Rooney, an ex-senior executive at Twitter’s Europe headquarters in Ireland, was told he had resigned when he did not respond to the email sent by Musk at the end of 2022 after he had acquired the company.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44billion in October 2022, sent an email to staff a few weeks later, telling them for ‘Twitter 2.0’ to succeed, employees would need to be ‘extremely hardcore’.
He ended the email with: ‘If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below’, adding that staff who did not click yes would receive three months’ severance pay.
Rooney did not click ‘yes’, Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), which rules on employment disputes in Ireland, heard.
Gary Rooney, an ex-senior executive at Twitter’s Europe headquarters in Ireland, was told he had resigned when he did not respond to an email sent by Elon Musk (pictured) at the end of 2022
Rooney, who was the director of ‘source-to-pay’, a procurement job at Twitter’s Dublin office at the time, received another email from the company three days later ‘to acknowledge your decision to resign and accept the voluntary separation offer’.
Rooney had worked at Twitter for nine years before he was told that the company considered him as having resigned on November 18, 2022 and that his access to Twitter’s systems had been deactivated, according to the Guardian.
The WRC heard that Rooney emailed Twitter a week later saying that ‘at no time have I indicated to Twitter that I am resigning my position, nor have I seen any separation agreement let alone accepted one’.
Rooney also said that he had loved his job at Twitter prior to Musk taking over.
He added that he was afraid of opening the email sent to employees asking them to click ‘yes’ for fear it was spam or malware.
In separate messages to two colleagues, Rooney voiced reservations about Musk’s plans for ‘Twitter 2.0’.
Rooney’s decision not to click ‘yes’ in the email did not constitute a resignation, WRC official Michael MacNamee concluded in a decision reported by the Irish Times.
Twitter had unsuccessfully claimed that Rooney not clicking ‘yes’ in the email meant that he had resigned voluntarily, with Lauren Wegman, senior director of human resources, adding that 235 of 270 staff members who received the email had clicked ‘yes’, the Guardian reports.
In regards to the rest of the employees who did not click yes, Wegman said that Twitter ‘accepted their resignations’.
Elon Musk is seen carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on on October 26, 2022 after buying the social media company
But MacNamee reportedly said in the WRC’s decision document that 24 hours was not ‘reasonable notice’.
He added that Rooney messaging colleagues with his reservations about the Musk takeover were not relevant in regards to the ‘termination of [Rooney’s] employment’.
The WRC ordered Twitter, which Musk rebranded as X in 2023, to pay Rooney £470,000 (€550,131) on Monday, with the Irish Times reporting it was the largest sum for unfair dismissal ordered by the body.
The amount is reportedly made up of lost earnings for Rooney from January 2023 to May 2024 – €350,131 – as well as €200,000 of future lost remuneration.
