You can fire people in the U.S. for any reason or none at all, but other places have other laws and breaking them can have consequences. Twitter fired an employee in Ireland who failed to respond to Elon Musk's bizarre emailed ultimatum calling on workers to be "extremely hardcore" or resign, and must now pay him €550,000 in compensation. It's the highest unfair dismissal award in Irish history.
Rooney, who had been with the company since 2013, was told that he was deemed to have resigned on 18 November and that his access to Twitter systems had been deactivated.
A week later, he emailed Twitter to say that "at no time have I indicated to Twitter that I am resigning my position, nor have I seen any separation agreement let alone accepted one". … Twitter claimed, unsuccessfully, that Rooney's failure to click "yes" in response to the email indicated that he had resigned voluntarily.
All but writing "we're going to constructively discharge you" in email would be comical but for the "if you don't do x, that means you've chosen to do y" mind game in this one, which is such a nightmare I imagine it helped the court find its way to such an uncompromising reaction.
