X Must Pay $605K For Firing Employee Who Refused To Work “Extremely Hardcore”

Elon Musk fired a Twitter employee in 2022 for not clicking “yes” to an email asking employees to commit to intense, undefined work conditions, and work “extremely hardcore.” Now, X must pay the employee more than $500,000 in retribution.

In November, 2022 Musk required employees to click “yes” in a link at the bottom of an email titled “A Fork in the Road.” The email asked employees 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.” Employees were given less than a month to agree to the new vague and unspecified conditions.

Gary Rooney, a senior executive at Twitter from Ireland, was one of the employees who refused to accept these terms. His decision not to click “yes” to Musk’s ultimatum led to his termination. According to RTÉ, Rooney argued that he was unjustly fired for not agreeing to Musk’s demands, a claim that Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has now upheld.

The WRC found that Twitter had no substantial grounds for dismissing Rooney and ordered the company to pay him a record €550,000 (around $605,000) in compensation.

“No employee, when faced with such a situation, could possibly be faulted for refusing to be compelled to give an open-ended unqualified assent to any of the proposals,” WRC adjudication officer Michael MacNamee wrote in the ruling.