PulteGroup, one of the nation's largest homebuilders and formerly based in metro Detroit, said Friday that it has fired its incoming chief operating officer in the wake of allegations he harassed the grandson of the company's founder on Twitter.

The company announced that Brandon Jones, who was to begin the COO job in January, "has been terminated and will leave the company effective immediately." The company's statement said Jones' departure followed "an independent investigation" that he had violated PulteGroup's code of ethical business conduct.

On Tuesday, Jones, who was PulteGroup's senior vice president of field operations, was sued individually — not as a corporate officer — by Bill Pulte, 34, the grandson of the late Pulte Homes founder William J. Pulte. The lawsuit accused Jones of holding a grudge against the younger Pulte and using several fake identities on Twitter to harass and troll him and other Pulte family members.

Bill Pulte lived in metro Detroit until recently and is known as a pioneer in "Twitter philanthropy."

More:Pulte grandson sues PulteGroup exec, claiming Twitter trolling

He has 3.2 million followers on the platform and regularly gives away money to people who message him and helps to raise funds for other needy individuals, including survivors and victims of the school shooting earlier this year in Uvalde, Texas.

Pulte says he opposed an earlier proposal by PulteGroup CEO Ryan Marshall to promote Jones to chief operating officer while he was on the company's board of directors from 2016 to 2020. This October, with Pulte off the board, the company announced that Jones would become executive vice president and COO starting Jan. 1.

Pulte's lawsuit claims that Jones used several alter ego Twitter accounts under fake names to harass and defame him, including the now-defunct @GoDetroitWin, and sometimes used two accounts in tandem to give the illusion of a conversation between different people.

Jones could not be immediately reached for comment Friday morning and didn't respond to a message left for him earlier in the week through the company.

Some of the offending tweets suggested, without evidence, that Bill Pulte's father, Mark Pulte, was somehow responsible for the devastating February fire at Oakland Hills Country Club.

PulteGroup isn't a party in Pulte's lawsuit, although the suit claimed that Jones used company time and possibly company equipment to carry out the alleged Twitter campaign, which could violate the company's ethics code.

Pulte said after filing the lawsuit that PulteGroup had hired a law firm to investigate Jones' conduct, although claimed the firm has existing relationships with the company and questioned its impartiality.

PulteGroup was started in Detroit in the 1950s and relocated its headquarters to Atlanta from Bloomfield Hills in the mid-2010s, a move that the Pulte family opposed.

Bill Pulte, who also runs his own private equity firm, has said he no longer owns any PulteGroup stock.

William J. Pulte died in 2018 at age 85. The lawsuit says Bill Pulte was his only descendant to receive an inheritance.

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: PulteGroup's Brandon Jones fired amid Bill Pulte Twitter trolling claim