- Last fall, Musk fired X number of employees who worked on his moderation efforts.
- An Irish employee is now claiming that tweets criticizing Musk’s team’s work constitute defamation.
- RTE reports that an Irish court has allowed a defamation lawsuit against Musk to proceed.
An employee of X is pursuing a legal defamation claim against Elon Musk.
According to a report from RTE, the country’s main news organization and broadcaster, a lawyer for Aaron Roderix, who remained at Twitter after Musk bought the platform and eventually renamed it X, said: On Monday, Musk was granted permission by an Irish court to defend him in connection with the defamation claims.
Mr. Roderix previously worked at Twitter as the leader of the threat destruction team, where he focused on combating misinformation on the platform. He and other Twitter employees were laid off last fall during months of layoffs that saw thousands of Twitter employees leave the company due to Mr. Musk’s extreme cost-cutting measures. was fired.
According to the report, Mr. Roderix successfully sued Mr. In this case, Mr. Roderix claims that his proposal to fire him was a “sham” based on his alleged involvement in tweets criticizing Mr. Musk.
At issue in the new defamation claim are Mr. Musk’s tweets after the fall layoffs that eliminated Mr. Roderix’s team, which focused on election integrity. In response to media reports about layoffs, Musk tweeted on his platform, “Oh, you mean the ‘election integrity’ team that was undermining election integrity? Yes, they’re gone. “I was,” he wrote.
RTE reported that Musk’s comments were “obviously referring to Roderix,” his lawyer said in court on Monday. Mr. Roderix was one of his few employees left to work on election integrity.
Roderix is now claiming that Musk’s posts falsely imply that he “undermined the integrity of the election, acted illegally, was incompetent and was removed from office.” The RTE report said this had caused damage to “his good name and reputation”.
Mr. Roderix’s lawyer said in court that Mr. Roderix wrote a letter directly to Mr. Musk “asking him to delete the tweet and make an offer of restitution,” but he has not received a response. The tweet in question remained as of Monday. Rodericks also wrote to Twitter’s Ireland-based division asking it to remove the tweet, and the division responded by saying it did not violate the platform’s rules and denied responsibility, RTE reported.
Roderix’s lawyers can now move forward with subpoenaing Musk.
Neither Roderix nor an X spokesperson responded to requests for comment.