I see this differently. Elon attacked the credibility of engineers at Twitter by publicly making up a lie about their incompetence and shouting it out with the biggest megaphone in the world.

Imagined another way, if your manager went to Twitter to announce to 1,000 followers how bad a snippet of your code was, he'd be a jerk.

When your boss is abusive towards you like this, it's a good thing to stand up for yourself and/or your peers. I imagine each Twitter engineer responding knew there was a good chance they'd be fired for it.

Now if they handled it the "professional" route you mentioned, that's fine, too. But when Elon started the mudslinging with a lie, I'm not going to begrudge someone telling the truth with some sass.

> try to help to the company by joining internal discussions about what's going on

Its been widely reported that internal communication is ineffective since the takeover, even before the mass firings which drove the expectations to managers have a expected span of 20 professional direct reports (exceeded wildly in some cases) and expected to also be actively coding themselves.

Musk could deal with that breakdown that he caused responsibly, or he could shoot the messenger and reinforce the thermocline of truth effect isolating him from knowledge of what is going on in the company he owns.

The new ratio is actually 70 engineers per EM.

I think you're right. Elon was a jerk, then the employees were jerks, and then Elon retaliated from his position of power. Was it fair? Absolutely not. Publicly humiliating someone is horrible, especially so from a position of power. But fairness doesn't come into play, when people are playing dirty like this. The original jerk couldn't win their original battle, so they escalated. Since they've thrown fair play away already, what remains is the legality, and legally this is all okay, I'm sure of it. And that's all there is to it.