A former Twitter engineer claims he was wrongly fired by a paranoid Elon Musk because of persistent press leaks shortly after the mogul bought the social media site according to a bombshell new book.
The engineer, Randall Lin, said he was blamed by Musk for violating a non-disclosure agreement and fired last February, writes Zoë Schiffer in “Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter.” earlier reported on by Business Insider.
Lin was accused of spilling dirt to Schiffer, a former tech reporter for The Verge and Platformer, who chronicled Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover in October 2022 in her new book, released Tuesday.
Twitter’s corporate security team at the time claimed during a meeting with Lin that they had proof he was the source behind two articles Schiffer co-wrote on Silicon Valley-focused news site Platformer: one that detailed the firing of another engineer who had been critical of Musk, and another about Musk’s tweets being boosted after the Super Bowl.
“I’ve never talked to Zoë [Schiffer] in my life,” Lin told the security team, according to excerpts from the book, first reported by Business Insider.
The San Francisco-based company, which has since been rebranded X, confiscated Lin’s laptop and fired him the following day.
Schiffer writes that she had never spoken to Lin at that time in her 352-page book.
But after his firing, Lin told Schiffer he had been an advocate of Musk’s $44 billion Twitter purchase because he wasn’t a fan of the company’s relaxed atmosphere under then-CEO Parag Agrawal.
Lin was also supportive of Musk’s decision to fire half of the social media site’s staff a month after taking the helm.
Lin, who was hired as a machine-learning engineer in 2020 at the age of 29, told Schiffer that he viewed his role as an opportunity to make history, according to BI.
In the year since leaving the company, Lin has come to believe that James Musk — Musk’s first cousin who was brought in with his brother, Andrew, after the billionaire’s takeover — was spreading rumors that Lin had admitted to leaking information that contributed to dozens of articles across mainstream media, Schiffer detailed, per BI.
Separately, there were reports in Ben Mezrich’s “Breaking Twitter” book, released last November about Musk’s acquisition of the platform, that James Musk was once found “basically sobbing” at the company’s San Francisco headquarters because he was worried “he would be fired just as easily as anybody else.”
Lin told Schiffer that his own “firing was so devastating to me because I did a lot of things to both appease Elon and shield my people and coworkers from him. The fact that they didn’t do that for me sat really wrong with me.”
“I realized that I was valued technically but that, somewhere along the way, someone lied about me, and my technical skill wasn’t enough to save me,” he added, according to BI.
Schiffer wrote that Lin’s story shows “the complicated game that anyone had to play if they wanted to exist in Musk’s inner orbit,” BI reported.
Representatives for X did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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