Elon Musk hires man who faked being fired from company

Twitter's new boss Elon Musk, who is known for taking nontraditional routes when it comes to running his businesses, has reportedly hired a man who pretended to be fired from the company during the first layoffs.

The billionaire fired nearly 3,500 employees in the first wave of employee cut down within a week of acquiring the social media firm. This is when a man named Daniel Francis and his friend Rahul Ligma, both of whom did not work at the company, faked being fired.

According to an Insider report, the duo claimed that they were engineers at Twitter and told social media that they had been laid off as they walked out of the Twitter office. It was later revealed that they were never even hired there.

While any other CEO would be infuriated by the spread of misinformation and fake news, Musk, who himself loves to joke around, hired Francis in the company. Francis is now officially a Twitter employee, a software engineer also a part of the internal Slack channel, the outlet reported. However, he does not have a formal designation right now.

Francis and Ligma announced the news of them being fired even before the layoffs began. Musk seemed to have enjoyed the prank and even welcomed the two saying that "it was a mistake " he had fired them. Responding to a prank with a prank, the billionaire joked about hiring them back to the company.

"Important to admit when I’m wrong & firing them was truly one of my biggest mistakes," he wrote.

At the time, most people did not know that both Francis and Ligma never even worked there.

Not long ago, Musk broke his silence over Twitter layoffs, claiming he had "no choice" over firing thousands of Twitter's employees just days after he purchased the company.

Musk tweeted how he had "no choice" over this move as the company was facing a substantial financial loss.

"Regarding g Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day," he wrote. "Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required."

According to The New York Times, sources close to the ordeal revealed that Musk planned to fire around half of Twitter's 7,500 employees. In light of the news, Tesla CEO took to the newly gained social media platform to explain his stance.

The employees were reportedly told that they should remain home and wait for an email about their future at the company.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted on Friday, November 4th, 2022. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

In response to the action, multiple employees moved quickly to file a class action lawsuit Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of Twitter workers, per NPR.