My read on that thread was that Elon was the one who took being corrected personally. The guy just pointed out that what Elon said about "1000 requests" was not correct nor was it the root cause of the performance issue Elon mentioned. If he had just said "sorry the Android app is slow, we're working on it", I suspect no one would have replied to him.

Yeah it was weird that Elon dropped that technical info, I assume he's talking about requests that happen on the backend that have nothing to do with android specifically? He couldn't have really thought 1000 round trips were happening between the phone and twitter. At least I hope not.

Elon should 100% be okay with one of his engineers responding to such a thing publicly if the engineer stays on topic and debates the points.

My interpretation of why he fired the guy was that Elon thought the app sucked and this guy had worked on it for 6 years. After a cursory grilling, he thought the guy's answers didn't hold water so he must be part of the problem. This is really bad form and doesn't account for the many externalities that the guy had faced. Most importantly, having the balls to call out the richest man in the world, who is also your boss, in a public form and STILL keep it on topic and professional shows that he has a good head on his shoulders. I really didn't think he was trying to score points or make it personal.

So in other words Elon is just like every other CEO in your estimation? Wasn't the whole point of the image Elon has been building that he's somehow different from everybody else? Then he reveals himself to just be the same old same old crap we've become accustomed to.

If it were me, I probably wouldn't have replied. I read later this was a Staff engineer working on optimizing the android app iirc. He was more blunt than I'd be comfortable with speaking to my CEO, but Elon seems to be someone who likes to get to the point so I was kind of surprised he reacted this way.

When your CEO is an engineer and wants to have an engineering conversation, you speak engineer together. The risk is that you lose. That's how Musk seems to have taken it, that the guy's answers didn't check out.

It bothered me quite a bit that he didn't give the engineer points for trying and keeping it on topic in the hellstorm of a thousand people shouting insults at Elon.

I think what I didn't like about it was Elon immediately turned it into this adversarial "what have you done to fix this" conversation. But I guess the guy did open with "this is wrong".