A former Twitter engineer, now X, says he was wrongfully fired after being accused of leaking information to the press.
Randall Lin reportedly violated the employee handbook and was fired from Twitter in February 2023, a few months after Elon Musk took over.
Speaking to Zoe Schiffer in her newly published book, “Extremely Hardcore,” Lin said that someone lied about her by leaking information to the press. Schiffer is a managing editor of the technology newsletter, Platformer.
Lin was first hired as a machine learning engineer at Twitter in February 2020, at the age of 29.
He quickly earned a promotion to the role of staff engineer, but was unhappy with the company’s relaxed atmosphere under former CEO Jack Dorsey, Schiffer writes.
So when Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, engineering was on board.
Prepared to meet Musk’s high expectations for employees, he would arrive early at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and leave after dinner to test himself.
He earned the new CEO’s respect, impressing him with a vision of Twitter’s cost savings by building their own GPUs and becoming a regular at meetings on the direction of the platform.
Workers install lighting on an “X” sign at the top of the downtown San Francisco building that housed what was officially known as Twitter, renamed the X by owner Elon Musk. Photo by Noah Berger/AP
Lin told Schiffer that he thought Musk’s decision to lay off half his staff in November 2022 was the right call, and says he saw the job as an opportunity to make history alongside a visionary CEO.
But as talented engineers critical of Musk’s new policies continued to be fired, leaks began to emerge from disgruntled employees at Twitter headquarters.
On February 24, 2023, Lin was summoned to meet with the corporate security team.
He says they claimed they had evidence that he was the source behind two Platformer articles written by Schiffer and a colleague — a report on the firing of an engineer who had been critical of Musk and a story about Musk’s tweets that grew after Super Bowl. .
“I have never spoken to Zoë [Schiffer] in my life,” he told the security team.
Schiffer confirms this in the book, saying she had never spoken to Lin at that point in time — and assumed that since he was so close to Musk’s inner circle, he wouldn’t talk to her.
But Lin’s laptop was taken and the next day he was fired.
As he left, Lin claims a colleague told him that James Musk, one of Elon Musk’s cousins, was telling people that Lin had admitted to leaking dozens of items.
Fearing that he would also be sued, he contacted Schiffer for more information. She couldn’t tell him anything, but passed on the names of two lawyers representing Twitter employees.
“The firing was so devastating to me because I did so many things to appease Elon and protect my people and my colleagues from him. The fact that they didn’t do that for me, I really liked,” he tells Schiffer in the book.
“I realized I was technically rated, but somewhere along the way, someone lied to me and my technical ability wasn’t enough to save me.”
Lin still insists he had no involvement in the leak, Schiffer writes in the book.
But his story simply shows “the complicated game that anyone had to play if they wanted to exist in Musk’s inner orbit,” she writes.
X did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.