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San Francisco [US]Oct 29 (ANI): Elon Musk became the new owner of Twitter Inc on Thursday and since then news of layoffs of former microblogging employees has been doing the rounds on the internet.

In the midst of Musk’s Twitter takeover, some pranksters even tried to hog the limelight. According to the New York Post, a pair of pranksters posing as fired Twitter employees fooled several media outlets as the public anxiously awaited news on whether Tesla’s CEO had begun cutting staff.

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Several images and videos of two men carrying boxes near the entrance to Twitter’s San Francisco building, claiming to have been fired by Musk, went viral on Friday.

Elon Musk has come up with a witty reaction to the whole joke episode by tweeting that “Ligma Johnson had it.”

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Musk’s tweet referenced one of the pranksters who said his name was “Rahul Ligma” — a reference to a popular Internet meme — and held up a copy of Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming” as he spoke with the journalists. The other said his name was “Daniel Johnson.”

Several news and media outlets reported on Twitter employees leaving the company’s headquarters, with boxes of personal items in hand. One of the most prominent posts was from CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa, who posted that an “entire team of data engineers” had been let go, Mashable reported.

Paul Lee, a product manager at Twitter, was one of those who called out the popular media organization for its report.

“Fantastically ironic that a major news outlet failed to do basic due diligence and fell for a crisis actor prank, resulting in the spread of misinformation, on the first day of new ownership,” he tweeted Lee. “All you had to do was ask to see a badge or look for bird-themed things in the boxes. Also, we don’t use Zoom.”

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Musk walked the halls of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, carrying the bowl of a sink that got huge views on the Internet. Musk tweeted a video of himself holding a kitchen sink and wrote, “Let it sink in!” Additionally, Elon Musk also changed his Twitter profile to read “Chief Twit” shortly after hinting that he was moving forward with the Twitter acquisition deal. In July, Musk, who had long expressed interest in buying Twitter, rescinded the deal, claiming that Twitter violated its mutual purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake accounts on its platform After Musk released the announcement of the end of the deal, the market experienced a sharp decline.

Twitter later sued Musk, accusing him of using bots as a pretext to get out of a deal. (ANI)

(This is an unedited, auto-generated story from the syndicated news feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)