First, this is basic human behavior. It appears this SVP had a job to manage social interactions and the author was stepping out of their role. Typical company policies are to manage social media via a point team, i.e. employees don't discuss work publicly. The author even mentioned this:

> In fact, I was so prolific on social media that I got the attention of several industry analysts who asked how my company used social media for brand promotion and marketing. Of course, since I was in engineering, I sent these inquiries over to our PR department.

The SVP was likely feeling the author was impacting company public relations, independent from the point team.

It would be equivalent to someone in marketing force pushing code to production.

Regarding the authors feelings -- again, he's stepping out of his role and not coordinating with the marketing team. Of course leadership would ask him to knock it off or be fired.

> His stern look communicated that he was talking about my career and was clearly not messing around. I felt bullied, threatened, and scared. Because I feared being unfairly scrutinized and I'd just had my job threatened, it was tough for me to feel comfortable saying anything about my work life on Twitter after that.

Shouldn't have been talking about work life on twitter anyway... The way the author discusses "bullying" is literally every interaction in a business. Organizations must be clear and consistent. Leaders need to be as well. Yes, they can fire you; yes, they can tell you what to do. That's life, that's the way human designed structures work.

> There are a few reasons why I think this happened to me. Being a young Black man in the tech field put me in a vulnerable position where different equals disposable. Maybe being privy to Rick's inherent lack of knowledge of the very thing he professed to be an expert on gave me some perceived leverage over him; thus, I was a threat to be eliminated. My lack of seniority and title also put me at a disadvantage. Ultimately, I believe that in true bully fashion, he got his kicks by using his power to affect other people's lives for sport.

Maybe that's true, but in all likelihood the author was stepping out of line. Discussing race in this context seems to detract from that actual events. The author even quit his "dream" job to to work in social media...

> This eventually led me to quit and pursue my passion for social media marketing outside my "dream" company.

Clearly, the author wasn't interested in their engineering job and decided to do something else -- fine, but not what the company hired them for.