Elon Musk ruffled feathers after sending an ultimatum to Twitter employees when he took over, but Gary Rooney wasn’t about to play chicken

Former Twitter worker Gary Rooney has won a $600,000 lawsuit after he it was presumed he’d resigned when he didn’t respond to an email.

After swooping in and taking over the social media platform in 2022, Elon Musk wasted little time in cracking the whip and offering employees an ultimatum.

If they agreed to his demands, they were required to click a link. Fail to click the link? Well, they could wave goodbye to their role.

Musk sent an email to all members of staff outlining his expectations for the company and their work within it when he took over.

He said in the 2022 email: “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.”

Musk then directed staff to a link and told them to click it if they wanted to be ‘part of the new Twitter’, giving them until 5:00pm New York time the next day.

Anyone who didn’t click the link would receive an outlined three months’ severance pay instead.

Rooney – director of ‘source to pay’ in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin at the time – saw the email, but didn’t click the link, which Twitter’s HR saw as a ‘decision to resign and accept the voluntary separation offer’.