Elon Musk’s X Ordered to Pay $600,000 to former Twitter employee over unfair dismissal

It seems more trouble is brewing for Elon Musk. And, no, it’s not about his recent interview with the former president of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

The Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, has been ordered to pay $600,000 to a former senior staff in the company’s Ireland-based operations. This is reportedly a record sum in award by the Workplace Relations Commision (WRC) for a case related to unfair dismissal.

The WRC was hearing a petition where it was reported that X decided that the employee, Gary Rooney, had resigned after he failed to tick a box that required him to agree to a new unspecified pay and conditions.

The response was to be registered within 24 hours to an email that Twitter’s new acquirer Elon Musk had shot to X employees in November 2022.

The court has found that the former senior employee of Twitter was dismissed unfairly after he failed to respond to the mail for Musk where the new boss asked staff to be ‘extremely hardcore’.

On November 18, 2022, Rooney, who was working with Twitter since 2013, was told that he was deemed to have resigned from the company.

In October 2022, Musk paid $44 billion to acquire the micro-blogging platform, which was later renamed as X. At the time, Rooney was serving as the director of source-to-pay, a procurement role in Twitter’s Dublin office.

Following his takeover, Musk sent a message to staff where he outlined his vision for the company. 
Musk’s first email as the new chief of Twitter read, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.”

The billionaire technocrat said that henceforth it would mean working long hours at high intensity, and that only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.

In the mail, the X chief asked that if the staff were sure that they want to be part of the new Twitter, they should click yes on a link below.

The mail added that the staff who failed to do so would receive three months’ severance pay. Rooney did not click ‘yes’ on the mail and three days later on November 19, 2022, he got another mail from the company asking him to acknowledge his decision to resign and accept the voluntary separation offer.

The executive was later informed that he was deemed to have resigned and his access to Twitter systems were deactivated.

After a week, Rooney mailed Twitter saying that he has not indicated to the company that he was resigning from his position and that neither has he seen any separation agreement nor accepted one.

Rooney told the court that he loved his job prior to Musk’s takeover, and that his initial reaction to the terse email was that of disbelief.  He admitted that he was afraid to open it at first thinking it could be spam or malware.

During the hearing, Lauren Wegman, senior director of human resources, said that out of 270 staff, 235 had clicked yes. She added that these were not among the 140 who had been already made redundant.

The WRC’s total unfair dismissal award GBP 5,50,131 consists of Rooney’s lost pay of GBP 3,50,131 between January 2023 and May 2024 and another estimated loss of future pay of about GBP 200,000.

The award sum will be paid by Twitter International Unlimited Company (currently X) to Rooney after the WRC ruled that his dismissal was unfair.

The court’s decision was based on the finding that Twitter had wrongfully characterised Rooney’s failure to click ‘yes’ in response to an email from Musk as a resignation, leading to his unfair dismissal.

After the email in November 2022, Musk went on to fire over 6,000 employees from Twitter’s staff, which is about 80 per cent of the total workforce.

Reportedly, existing staff were forced to justify their roles and even judge if their colleagues should be retained.

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