Ex to be more precise, because he was fired.
This cartoon was published in April and is by Enmanuel Cornet, a 41-year-old Frenchman who is among the first to be fired since news broke of Elon Musk's imminent landing on Twitter
It belongs to a series that Manu compiles on a page called "Twittoons. Cartoons about life on Twitter", where he had been working as a software engineer for just over a year. His previous job, which he left to join Twitter, was at Google
He worked there for a decade, during which time he also drew satirical cartoons about the company, collected here under the name "Goocomics. Comics about life at Google"
Manu believes he was fired after the Elon Musk takeover because the new management did not want to deal with a "troublemaker".
All this is told in a summarised and extended form on his website in an interesting text entitled "Bye Twitter"where he also tells other "curious" tidbits, some of which were already known and others that were not, but which were intuited or even taken for granted.
"Since I was one of the early layoffs after the Oct 2022 acquisition of Twitter, some people have been curious about the reasons. My current understanding is that I was too much of a potential troublemaker for the new management."
"In Oct 2021, Twitter HR had asked me to take down a cartoon I had posted. I took down the internal post, but I took issue with the fact that they also asked me to take down my public Twitter post (which should have been outside of their authority). The then-CEO Jack Dorsey had sent me a very short question about that (when Manu commented that even at Google he didn't suffer such aggressive censorship attempts):
"All those cartoons have been public ever since, on Twittoons," Manu says.
"In Oct 2022, as Elon Musk was visiting the San Francisco office, I made a printed version of this cartoon with a short inscription and handed it to him."
'He took the print and said โWell I bought it anywayโ, replying to the line in the cartoon'.
Now, Cornet is one more of those who have joined in a class action lawsuit for dismissal, and he announced on his Twitter account on 4 November.
"Was not planning on doing anything like this initiallyโฆ Butโฆ Look Ma I'm suing Twitter.".
It remains to be seen what concrete actions, beyond words, will be taken in response to the layoffs of its workforce in Spain, however, the soap opera is not over
Elon Musk, now officially Tonter's biggest pain in the ass, is a great generator of absurd ideas
This feeds and encourages rumours of all kinds, such as the latest one that he "could" or "contemplated" putting Twitter under a paywall. Something that has been twisted in the media until it has become a headline that ends up almost affirming that this is what is going to happen.