The subject misquotes the tweet. It did not say "Shay Pierce". It just said it was the one employee who turned down going to Zynga.
However, there was a second tweet that did explicitly mention Pierce. Here's a screenshot showing both: http://i.imgur.com/Dob8n.jpg
The text of the other tweet is "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many...".
These tweets were on March 30, so they are not April fools jokes.
Shay Pierce was the only employee not to go to Zynga [1]. Even though the tweet doesn't explicitly mention Shay Pierce I'd say that the subject is still fairly accurate.
I know this is pedantic but the subject is a quote, so your parent is correct. It really should have either used square brackets around the name, or been written differently. Personally, I feel that once you open a double-quote there's a certain responsibility.
The adjacent tweet from the CEO mentions Shay by name. I'm usually a stickler for this kind of thing as well, but this one reads as entirely unambiguous to me.
Our window for reaching its peak was gone. I sat in our tent, unable to do anything, while my dream of climbing Mount Everest faded
It's wrong to quote them as saying
"Our window for reaching Mount Everest's peak was gone"
Even though the "its" is clearly referring to Mount Everest. There are a couple options, the simplest being:
"Our window for reaching [Mount Everest's] peak was gone"
What worries me is that people don't know this. That you can just substitute/fill in a quote because it's obvious that's what the person meant. Rather, it should be thought of as a recording device that can only play back exactly what the person said.
And if I were the acquirer I'd be wondering just how bad he thinks his team is, and why he didn't do anything about it before I made offers to all of them.
However, there was a second tweet that did explicitly mention Pierce. Here's a screenshot showing both: http://i.imgur.com/Dob8n.jpg
The text of the other tweet is "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many...".
These tweets were on March 30, so they are not April fools jokes.