Failure to respond to email from Elon Musk leads to US$600,000 award to former employee

A former senior employee at Twitter's European headquarters in Ireland has been awarded more than €550,000 for wrongful dismissal following her failure to respond to an email from Elon Musk, according to reports.

Gary Rooney, who was director of acquisitions at Twitter International in Dublin, was fired shortly after Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter.

But Ireland's Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) ruled in favor of Rooney, setting a record for unfair dismissal of awards in the country, reports The Guardian.

Shortly after the acquisition, Musk sent an email to employees outlining his vision for “Twitter 2.0,” which includes long hours and high workloads.

“Moving forward, building on the success of Twitter 2.0 and succeeding in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely resilient,” Musk wrote in an email as quoted by The Guardian.

The email asked employees to confirm their commitment by clicking on a link, and those who did not respond were given three months' severance pay.

Rooney was one of the employees who did not click “yes” on the link provided in the message. He then received an email three days later from Twitter acknowledging his “decision to resign” and confirming that he was accepting the voluntary separation request.

He was told that he is expected to resign on November 18, 2022, as his access to the company's systems has been blocked.

Rooney denied this in an email to Twitter a week later, saying: “I have never announced on Twitter that I am resigning, and I have never seen a separation agreement let alone accepted it.”

WRC decision to resign 'voluntarily'

During a five-day hearing at the WRC in Dublin, Rooney testified that he initially believed Musk's email was spam or malware and was afraid to open it.

Twitter said Rooney's failure to respond to Musk's email constituted a voluntary resignation.

According to Lauren Wegman, Twitter's senior director of human resources, the company accepted the resignation of 35 employees who did not click “yes” on Musk's email. A total of 270 received the message.

The WRC, however, dismissed the claim, with WRC judge Michael MacNamee ruling that the 24-hour notice period provided in Musk's email was “unreasonable.”

MacNamee awarded Rooney €550,131, which includes lost wages from January 2023 to May 2024 of €350,131 and future lost earnings of €200,000.