Ireland court blocks Elon Musk from firing top Twitter exec

A court in Ireland has blocked billionaire Twitter CEO Elon Musk from firing a top employee of the company.

Ireland’s High Court granted an injunction to Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, on Friday. The court order only prevents McSweeney’s firing temporarily while the court considers whether Twitter properly terminated her.

McSweeney argues she was receiving “mixed messages” from Twitter and never accepted a severance package, according to local media reports. She states that she has been locked out of Twitter’s Dublin office and cannot access the company’s employee network.

McSweeney’s case comes after Musk fired thousands of Twitter employees across the globe, removing roughly two-thirds of Twitter’s original 7,500 employees.

 

Musk stated last week that the mass firings were over, however, and that the company would begin hiring again.

 

He clarified in an all-hands meeting that his leadership was a “moderate” not “right-wing” takeover of the company, according to a recording obtained by the Verge. Other employees pressed him on whether the company might move to Texas.

 

“If we want to move the headquarters to Texas I think it would play into the idea that Twitter has gone from being left-wing to right-wing, which is not the case,” he responded. “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter. It is a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”

“To be the digital town square, we must represent people with a wide array of views even if we disagree with those views,” he continued.

He went on to argue that the company should focus more on Twitter’s influence overseas, particularly in Japan.

“It may seem as though Twitter is U.S.-centric but if anything it’s Japan-centric,” he said, according to the Verge. “There are roughly the same number of daily active users in Japan as there are in the U.S., despite the fact that Japan has one third of the population of the U.S.”

Musk has fired swaths of employees in the weeks since he purchased the company, and more than 1,000 have resigned of their own accord.