A former senior employee at Twitter’s European headquarters in Ireland has been awarded more than €550,000 for unfair dismissal after failing to respond to an email from Elon Musk, according to reports.

Gary Rooney, who served as Twitter’s international purchasing manager in Dublin, was fired shortly after Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter.

But Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission ruled in Rooney’s favour, setting a record for unfair dismissal awards in the country, the Guardian reported.

Employment Dispute with Twitter

Rooney had been with Twitter since 2013 and was the director of source-to-pay when Musk acquired the company in October 2022 for $44 billion.

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

“In the future, in order to build a leading Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely aggressive,” Musk wrote in the email, which was reported by The Guardian.

The email asked employees to confirm their commitment by clicking on a link, with a three-month end-of-service gratuity offered to those who did not respond.

Rooney was one of the employees who did not click the “yes” button on the link in the message. Three days later, he received an email from Twitter acknowledging his “decision to resign” and confirming that he had accepted the offer of voluntary separation.

He was informed that he was deemed to have resigned on November 18, 2022, and that his access to company systems had been disabled.

Rooney disputed this in an email to Twitter a week later, saying: “At no point did I indicate to Twitter that I was resigning from my position, nor did I see any separation agreement let alone accept one.”

ITU decision on ‘voluntary’ resignation

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

Twitter claimed that Rooney’s failure to respond to Musk’s email constituted a voluntary resignation.

According to Twitter’s chief human resources officer, Lauren Wegman, the company accepted the resignations of 35 employees who disagreed with Musk’s email. A total of 270 people received the email.

But the World Rally Commission rejected the claim, with WRC arbitrator Michael McNamee ruling that the 24-hour notice period provided in Musk’s email was “unreasonable.”

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