Even sleeping on the office floor won’t buy you Elon Musk’s love at Twitter, as another 200 staffers who met his ‘hardcore’ requirements were pink-slipped Saturday night, but "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams meanwhile Elon’s support over his racist diatribe.

Considering that Elon Musk grew up awash in inherited apartheid wealth, it is not surprising that his views on racism might come down on the side of “wealthy white people are the real victims of racism!” And so it appeared this weekend, in the aftermath of "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams getting his strip cut from newspapers over a racist diatribe, and since then, his publisher discontinuing the cartoon, and Adams losing his upcoming book deal.

Enter Elon Musk, who apparently felt his opinion on this matter was crucial. As the Chronicle reports, and as seen below, Musk jumped into a thread on the "Dilbert" guy discourse to declare that “The media is racist,” and to imply that there was no racism on the part of Adams, who said “get the hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away.”

Musk also tweeted and deleted — maybe he thought better of it? — a reply to Adams saying "What are they complaining about?" The "they" here, presumably, is the media and all the newspapers now canceling "Dilbert."

Adams has been continuing to tweet, pretty incessantly, over the last 72 hours, insisting that "everyone agreed" with everything he said and he was being canceled nonetheless, and "White people in the media are also the main source of worsening race relations." Also, he claims that he "identified as black for several years."

When Adams rhetorically asked in a tweet, around 5:40 a.m. Saturday, "Is it racist to avoid racists who are the same race as each other? Or is it only racist if the racists you are avoiding are white?", Musk also replied, "Simultaneously, an interesting question and a tongue twister!"

As this was all happening, back in the emerald mines that are the SF/Silicon Valley tech sector, the New York Times reports that Musk laid off another 200 Twitter employees, seemingly abruptly, on Saturday night. And this may indicate broader financial difficulties, as Platformer reported last week that Twitter employees lost access to Slack, for the extremely predictable reason (in the words of a Twitter employee), “We didn't pay our Slack bill. Now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.”

It’s not remarkable that Twitter had more layoffs — Musk has been laying people off by the thousands since taking over in late October. What is remarkable is that Musk apparently laid off some of his most loyal, hardest-core sycophants. That includes Esther Crawford (seen above sleeping in an office), Twitter’s director of product management, who's described in media reports as “chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription.”

Certainly the rollout of Crawford’s pet project Twitter Blue, the $8-a-month subscription service, has been an unmitigated disaster. Yet that may be more because Musk kept changing his mind on what the $8 offering would entail, and when it would roll out. But given that Twitter reportedly lost half of its major advertisers in recent months, the monetization team might not be the right team to blow up.

Yet blow it up Musk did, as the Times reports “The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, was reduced to fewer than eight people from 30.”

But hey, who knows, "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams could be looking for work. Maybe they’ll hire him to run Twitter payments!

Related: Elon Musk's Twitter Debacle Mocked on Mardi Gras Parade Float [SFist]

Image: @evanstnlyjones via Twitter