It should be a pretty obvious that there is strong correlation between employee dissatisfaction and employee performance, so a lot of these situations can be pretty noisy he-said/she-said cases. A lot of people can be publicly critical of a CEO, and the subset of those who get fired for performance reasons can have reason to complain about it being retaliatory.<p>But let's be real here. This is Elon Musk. There's probably an obvious paper trail. And anyone who is actually being terminated for performance at a large company <i>should</i> be on a PIP (performance improvement plan) long before they are terminable, so it would be obvious to all involved that it was not retaliatory.