She worked for Twitter. Then she tweeted at Elon Musk.

In early November, Twitter’s approximately 7,500 employees received a terse email from a generic address: “In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our workforce. global work. The note was signed “Twitter”. On November 3, some people at the company received emails saying they would be fired the next day.

That night, Mrs. Solomon, her husband and a few colleagues went to the Dots Cafe Portland, a lounge on Clinton Street. The phones were on the table, face up, she said. As the friends from work talked, they tapped their phones, participating in Signal app chats with colleagues in London, Seattle and San Francisco. Messages like “I’ve been touched” flew across the screens, Ms Solomon recalled. “You saw your colleagues dropping like flies,” she said.

The following afternoon, his team of about 10 engineers was reduced to four. Mrs. Solomon and her husband had survived the series of layoffs. The following week, she recalls, she waited for further guidance from Mr. Musk or the new management team. Nothing came, she said, except for an email alerting employees that remote work would no longer be allowed, with some exceptions.

Many employees learned of Mr. Musk’s priorities by watching his Twitter feed, where he frequently posted information about company activities to his more than 100 million followers. On November 5, he complained about the platform’s search function: “Look for in Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in 1998! It will also improve much faster,” he wrote. On the same day, he tweeted: “Twitter will soon add ability to attach long text to tweets, ending the nonsense of notepad screenshots.

That was more than Ms. Solomon and many of her colleagues had heard internally. “Radio silence,” she said. She began venting her frustration on Twitter.

One of his first tweets in this vein came on Nov. 6, shortly after Mr. Musk announced a new rule for Twitter users in a tweet:All any name change will result in temporary loss of verified tick,” he wrote. He had posted the message after many people on Twitter changed their names to variations of Mr Musk’s name, with most scoffing.