A Twitter engineer fired by Elon Musk after a public spat on the platform says 'no one can trust anyone' at the company anymore

Elon Musk’s Twitter account is displayed on the screen of an iPhone on April 26, 2022 in Paris, France. Chesnot/Getty Images

• A Twitter engineer fired by Musk told Forbes "no one can trust anyone within the company anymore."
• Eric Frohnhoefer was dismissed by Musk after a public spat over Twitter's Android service.
• Frohnhoefer said "things went downhill" at Twitter after Musk's takeover, per Forbes. 

A former Twitter engineer fired by Elon Musk on Monday said "no one can trust anyone within the company anymore," in an interview with Forbes.

San Diego-based Eric Frohnhoefer, who worked as a software engineer at Twitter for eight years said in the interview that he didn't feel strongly about Musk initially, but "things went downhill" in the days after the takeover as trust between staff eroded.

"No one trusts anyone within the company anymore," he told Forbes. "How can you function? Employees don't trust the new management. Management doesn't trust the employees. How do you think you're supposed to get anything done? That's why there's production freezes – you can't merge code, you can't turn things on without permission from VPs."

Frohnhoefer got into a dispute with Musk on Twitter about technical issues after the billionaire CEO tweeted on Sunday that he'd "like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries." 

Frohnhoefer responded that he had worked on Twitter for Android for six years and that Musk was "wrong." Musk fired back by asking the veteran engineer what he had done to "fix" Twitter being "super slow" on Android. 

The online confrontation invited a lot of attention and one Twitter user said "You probably don't want this guy on your team," to Musk. Musk responded in a now deleted tweet "He's fired," on Monday morning. 

Frohnhoefer then found he was locked out of his laptop just five hours later and posted pictures of his deactivated company laptop to Twitter.   

Frohnhoefer told Forbes that the company did not provide any formal communication about his dismissal, calling Musk's team "a bunch of cowards." 

He said he was one of the few employees who had survived the initial round of layoffs, which saw 50% of Twitter's roughly 8,000 employees depart. 

Musk's exchange with Frohnhoefer is the latest in a series of clashes with Twitter staffers, both present and past. On Sunday, he argued with a former employee about Twitter's free lunch programs, with Musk claiming they cost the company $400 per employee.

Twitter and Frohnhoefer did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.