I think respect is earned, not an entitlement due to someone's ability to buy a company. There are plenty of bad bosses who should not be taken seriously.
Technology is famous for inverting the classic boss vs lackey relationship. Without an engineer, the boss cannot build what they want. Engineers are your eyes and ears, they're the ones who can tell you if an idea can or can't work... and ultimately are the ones who will build the products.
Twitter engineers are the ones best positioned into knowing what is or isn't possible with Twitter's codebase, for whatever the heck Elon Musk wants to do with the code.
If Elon thinks he can just walk in with a bunch of Tesla engineers and have his trusted Tesla programmers figure things out, he's gonna be in for a surprise. Programming doesn't work like that, it often takes 6+ months for a set of engineers to reach competence with a codebase.
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There's a myriad of stories about how "bad bosses tell engineers what to do, instead of listening to them" around here. Why? Because we're largely a set of programmers / hackers on this discussion site. We all know how bad management can be.
What Musk is doing right now? Obviously and clearly bad management. Musk has no trust over the Twitter engineers at all.
Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Want to tell your boss what you really think about em? Sure, you can do it any day, just better have some savings and an alternate source of income :).
Disclaimer: Self-employed so I don't have to deal with that.
Well, they should, he is their boss now.