A senior Dublin-based manager with Twitter who was deemed by the company to have resigned when he failed to sign up to the new “hard-core” work environment set out by Elon Musk had, in fact, availed of an “enhanced opportunity” to depart with severance pay, the company has told the Labour Court.
Twitter International Unlimited, now X, is appealing awards totalling €550,131 made to Gary Rooney by the Workplace Relations Commission last year over the circumstances of his departure from the company’s Dublin office where he had been employed for nine years by late 2022 when Mr Musk bought the firm for $44 billion (€38.15 billion).
Mr Rooney, a financial manager and director with global responsibilities in a number of areas, says he was unfairly dismissed and continues to earn over €16,000 less per month due to the cut in salary he has taken since starting work with a bank as well as the loss of substantial bonuses linked to Twitter’s share performance before its sale.
He puts his total losses to date at €689,406 and is seeking that amount.
RM Block
At a Labour Court hearing in Dublin on Tuesday, Cathy Smith SC for X, said the company’s position is Mr Rooney had decided to leave and had clearly communicated this to colleagues in Slack messages read to the court before changing his mind.
Mr Rooney said he had actually refused to sign up to unspecified new work practices, in part because the extremely limited time given to decide on his future was not reasonable and the messages were being taken out of context.
Ms Smith described his estimated losses as “wildly inaccurate”.
She put it to Mr Rooney he was not entitled to claim the substantial sums he had previously expected to receive in share related bonuses because their vesting was expressly linked to his continued employment by the firm, a condition to which he he had agreed.
Mr Rooney’s case is that these terms were negated due to the circumstances of his departure.
Mr Rooney characterised the atmosphere within the company in the weeks after the Musk takeover as “chaotic” as about half of the firm’s staff lost their jobs.
[ Twitter ordered to pay record €550,000 to senior executive in IrelandOpens in new window ]
On November 16th, Mr Musk sent an email titled “Fork in the Road” to the company’s remaining employees. In this, he said that to “build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hard-core. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
The email required employees to click “yes” in a link at the bottom of the email. Anyone who did not do so by 10pm Irish time the following day, it said, would be deemed to have resigned and receive three months’ pay in severance.
The following morning the company followed up with an Frequently Asked Questions document in which it assured the employees the email from Mr Musk had been genuine and not a phishing exercise as some had believed.
Mr Rooney, who received gross pay of €334,114.84 during 2022 until December 18th when his employment formally ended, said he did not know what the implications of signing up would be as he already routinely worked in excess of 40 hours per week and had been recognised through a variety of significant bonuses to be a high performer.
Asked by counsel, Padraic Lyons SC, who was briefed Barry Kenny of Kenny Sullivan Solicitors, whether his situation might reasonably be described as “an enhanced opportunity” to go, as Ms Smith, briefed by Mason Hayes & Curran for X, had suggested, Mr Rooney said he didn’t know how it could characterised as such.
Asked if he believed he had tendered his resignation by not ticking the box, he said: “No. Absolutely not.”
