Elon Musk fired a Twitter employee in 2022 for not clicking “yes” on an email that asked employees to accept harsh, undefined working conditions and work “extremely hard.” Now X must pay the employee more than $500,000 in compensation.

In November 2022, Musk required his employees to click on a link at the bottom of an email titled “A Fork in the Road.” The email urged employees to “build a groundbreaking Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world. We must be extremely tough. That means working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will be enough to survive.” Employees were given less than a month to agree to the new vague and unspecified terms.

Gary Rooney, a senior Twitter executive from Ireland, was one of the employees who refused to accept these terms. His decision not to accept Musk’s ultimatum led to his dismissal. According to RTÉ, Rooney argued that he was unfairly dismissed for not agreeing to Musk’s demands. The Irish Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has now confirmed this claim.

The WRC concluded that Twitter had no valid reasons for dismissing Rooney and ordered the company to pay the record compensation of 550,000 euros (around 605,000 US dollars).

“No employee in such a situation can be accused of refusing to give his permanent and unconditional consent to any of the proposals,” wrote Michael MacNamee, the WRC’s decision-making officer, in his judgment.