Twitter chaos continues as Elon Musk scraps free meals and fires developer after public dispute

Elon Musk's treatment of his Twitter staff is continuing to draw criticism as he scraps free meals for remaining San Francisco employees and seemingly fired a developer via a tweet.

The Tesla CEO who bought the social media app in October for $44 billion has been making widespread changes as he restructures the company.

His latest actions come after he laid off half the workforce, including CEO Parag Argrawal and introduced an $8 subscription fee for users to keep their verified ‘blue tick’, while losing more than a million users on the platform.

Remaining staff now claim that their new boss is 'starving' them after he withdrew free meals at the Californian base - citing low occupancy in the office and a food cost of over $400 a person.

People voiced their disgust at Elon's latest move on Twitter, with one saying: “He fired ¾ of the employees. Now he’s planning to starve the rest.”

While another hit back at Musk’s claims: “This is a lie. I ran the programme up until a week ago when I resigned because I didn’t want to work for Elon Musk. For breakfast and lunch we spend $20-$25 a day per person.”

They added that attendance in the offices was always 20-50%, while Musk responded stating that records show average occupancy was less than 10%.

Software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer contradicted Musk online after the new boss apologised for a slow service on Android devices.

Frohnhoefer, who had worked for the social media app since 2008, tweeted a list of of actions he had undertaken to prevent a slow performance and took exception to Musk's tweet that read: “Btw, I’d like to apologise for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline.”

Following their conversation in the comments section, Musk simply wrote ‘he’s fired’ to which Frohnhoefer seemingly confirmed his exit by tweeting a picture of a locked computer with the caption, ‘Guess it is official now’.

As staff levels and speeds of the app dropped, so did share prices of some large companies such as Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly on Friday 11 November, after fake accounts were made with the verified blue tick badge and damning tweets published.

For example, a tweet was sent by a fake Lockheed Martin account that read: “We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses.”

The blue tick was originally reserved for politicians, journalists and famous personalities but with Musk’s new subscription plan fake verified accounts have mushroomed.

Musk had further problems to deal with as his own brands Tesla and SpaceX had duplicate accounts made along other big brands including Nestle and Roblox.