Rule #1 for working at any company: Do not insult the CEO in public. I’m having a hard time imagining any company that wouldn’t crack down on you if you did that.
One reason I never talked about my employer is because there is a general prohibition against saying anything bad about the company while identifying yourself as an employee. It’s a potential termination offense. You can say, “I think automation is dangerous” and get away woth it, but if you say, “I’m an employee at Siemens, and I think our automation could be dangerous”, expect at least a severe talking-to. If you leak e-mails to make the CEO look bad, or otherwise smack-talk the CEO while you are identifying as an employee, you’d simply be fired.
In this case, not only are the employees insulting their boss, they are intentionally subverting what he wants to do. I’d fire them too.
Now, if an employee had a private heated exchange with me and called me a name, I’d put up with it if the employee was otherwise valuable. But no one would ever know about the exchange.
One other factor here is that Elon knows Twitter has a lot of activist employees opposed to him politically, who will likely be a thorn in his side and may actually sabotge the company from within, ‘quiet quit’, or whatever. So when these idiots insult him, they are just letting him know who to fire. It’s not the insults per se, it’s that they ‘out’ potential problem employees in the company. I wouldn’t want employees who hate me and hate my goals, and if I could get them to all hold up a sign identifying themselves, I’d fire the lot. Elon has been doing basically that.