One former Twitter employee played the most profitable game of chicken imaginable

One former Twitter employee managed to win a settlement of over $600,000 after a ‘savage’ email from Elon Musk requiring employees to buy in to a new ‘hardcore’ working environment left him unemployed.

Elon Musk’s two years in charge of Twitter, now X, have certainly been a rollercoaster ride, and while the company has now lost lost 72% of the $44 billion that the tech mogul initially paid for it, it didn’t exactly get off to the right foot either.

Leaked emails showed that Musk wasn’t happy with the state of Twitter prior to buying it, and his opening statements to employees continued to assert this belief too.

Elon Musk began his Twitter stewardship with mass culling of employees (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

In an email outlining his expectations for the company under his leadership, Musk explained: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.

This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

He then provided staff with a link that they needed to click to ‘buy in’ to his new project and keep their jobs, and failing to participate would terminate their contracts with three months of severance pay.

What’s more, Musk also only gave employees around 24 hours to respond to this email, which was the case for all global company members.

One such employee that didn’t click on the link in time was Gary Rooney, now former director of ‘source to pay’ at the Dublin Twitter HQ.

He claims he did see Musk’s email but thought that it was spam and subsequently ignored it.

He was shortly informed by HR that his failure to click the link was indicated as a decision to resign and accept voluntary redundancy, but Rooney decided to take his case for the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in Ireland.

Rooney fought and won his case against Twitter, netting $600,000 in the process (Twitter/@curlygaz)

The report from the WRC showed that Rooney had never indicated that he wished to resign – despite the email’s indication that non-compliance would result in termination – and it also indicated that he had indeed opened the email at one point, discussing with another colleague that he needed to ‘step away’ and think about the decision.

Thankfully for Rooney the WRC fell in his favor, ruling that the 24 hours given by Musk wasn’t enough for such a decision to be made. Additionally, he was also awarded €550,131 ($607,802) as a result of lost earnings both between his termination and the case decision, and also in the future.

What was ultimately a cost-cutting measure by Musk following his purchase of the company ended up being more expensive in some ways, but his actions have reduced the employee count by around 80%, taking it from roughly 7,500 staff before his takeover to around 1,500 in April 2023.