Rahul Ligma is a fictional fired Twitter employee, a character played by one of a pair of amateur improvisational actors that pranked multiple major media outlets on October 28, 2022.
The spontaneous and intentionally transparent hoax was revealed the same day, after the initial news coverage triggered debate among real Twitter employees about whether or not expected mass layoffs had already started.
On October 28, 2022, many members of the press were present outside Twitter's San Francisco headquarters on the first day that Elon Musk gained control of the social media company.
That day, two individuals identifying as "Rahul Ligma" and "Daniel Johnson" left Twitter's building carrying large cardboard boxes, pretending to be two recently fired employees departing with their belongings.
[6][7] Claiming to be a Tesla owner and a software engineer with Twitter for the past three years, he also identified himself as "a big fan of clean energy, climate change, even free speech too.
Based on the visual of the fake employees carrying boxes, two Bloomberg journalists wrote that mass layoffs were already underway at Twitter,[10] but actually it was only top executives that had lost their jobs.
[13] Later in the day on October 28, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, aware of the joke, continued the crude puns by tweeting about the firing that "Ligma Johnson had it coming", along with eggplant and water splash emojis.
[5] He criticized the journalists for not bothering to search for "Daniel Johnson" and "Rahul Ligma" before publishing their stories, and remarked, "it's probably not great that during a time of immense and worrisome change at one of the largest tech platforms...all we're left with is BOFA reporting.
[12] Again on video with a cardboard box, this time on a sandy beach, Ligma commented, "It's really tough, this is my second job in a month", adding, "Web2 chewed me up and spit me out, I just really thought Web3 was gonna be different.
"[23] The following day, the Indonesian news website VOI also published the photograph in an article with the caption "Rahul Ligma, Elon Musk, and Daniel Johnson, are back as a team".