Elon Musk fires Twitter engineer for arguing with him publicly

You're normal, the developer was being a jerk. And, second, who cares?

Can we start talking about important things again?

I think it depends on the circumstances and what you hope to get out of it. If my CEO said something that was technically wrong, I'm not sure I'd even reach out to them in private unless it was actually important. They run the company, and hire people to do X, and while CEOs very likely know a lot about a lot of the different Xs, they often don't really need to. If I knew my CEO would appreciate, and, need to know something, I would tell them in private, but not over the stuff you've seen with Elon. Though to be fair, in some of these cases Elon has asked some of the engineers directly in public first, and then you sort of get what you ask for.

That being said. If I was currently at Twitter in a high value position, I might also take the opportunity to get myself publicly fired. Maybe not in a fashion that is as rude as this particular example, but I'm guessing that even this display is still good exposure in terms of getting promptly rehired elsewhere.

We're in an in-demand field. Most of use exploit it by wearing programming joke t-shirts (again, not the rude ones) in dress code companies where we get away with it as long as we can dress up for when it matters, but I can certainly see why you'd want to get aboard the wave of people getting personally fired for correcting Elon Musk if you had no interest at remaining at Twitter under his leadership.

Disagreeing with Musk privately gets you the same result:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/15/23460729/elon-musk-fire-...

So you might as well do it publicly.