Jay Weinberg says Slipknot firing still confuses him, years later

Jay Weinberg is still trying to make sense of how a decade-long run in Slipknot ended, and his latest comments show the wound has not closed. The drummer said the firing “remains confusing,” and described the moment as the point when his “world bottomed out from under” him.

Weinberg said the dismissal came without explanation, leaving him heartbroken and blindsided after years in one of metal’s biggest bands. He also suggested he may have become a scapegoat, a choice of words that gives the split a harsher edge than a simple personnel change. Slipknot had announced on November 5, 2023, that it had made a “creative decision” to part ways with him, but Weinberg’s latest remarks make clear that the reason still does not fully add up to him.

That unresolved feeling matters because Weinberg was not a short-term fill-in. He joined Slipknot in 2014 after Joey Jordison’s departure in 2013 and spent roughly a decade behind the kit, playing on three Slipknot albums. The band had also publicly celebrated him, naming him Metal Drummer of the Year in Modern Drummer’s Readers Poll in both 2022 and 2023, which makes the abrupt November 2023 split look even starker in hindsight.

The personal strain around the breakup also runs through Weinberg’s health history with the band. He said his hip pain began in 2018, and later, during the COVID era, he learned he had femoroacetabular impingement from a torn labrum. The injury brought limited mobility and a complicated surgery timeline, and he said he had been asked not to have the operation because Slipknot had recording and touring commitments. That detail adds another layer to the breakup story, because it ties the end of the job not just to band politics, but to the physical toll of keeping up with a punishing live schedule.

Weinberg moved on in 2024, officially joining Suicidal Tendencies and playing his first show with the band in Osaka, Japan, in March of that year. He later left that group too, but the Slipknot exit still stands out as the one that landed hardest. For drummers tracking career stability, legacy pressure and the way major bands handle power behind the scenes, Weinberg’s story is a reminder that even a high-profile seat can disappear with startling speed, and without the closure players expect.