Twitter CEO Elon Musk has apologized for mocking a disabled Twitter employee who he accused of doing “no actual work” and said was “the worst,” when the senior employee asked if he was still employed at the company after being locked out of his work accounts and devices.
Breitbart News recently reported that a Twitter employee recently took to the social media platform to ask Elon Musk directly if he had been fired after his access to his work accounts were denied and he received no information from Twitter’s HR department on his employment status.
Haraldur Thorleifsson, also known as “Halli,” who had been unable to access his work computer for approximately nine days, tweeted at Musk on Monday to inquire about his employment status. Musk responded by questioning the employee’s work performance, leading to a back-and-forth exchange that has caused widespread criticism.
Thorleifsson stated in his initial tweet that he had not received a response from Twitter’s human resources division regarding whether he had been fired. He claimed that he might have been one of the 200 workers the business laid off in February.
Musk asked Thorleifsson, “What work have you been doing?” Thorleifsson replied that he managed the prioritization of design projects and saved the company $500,000 on a software-as-a-service contract.
When pressed for more information by Musk, Thorleifsson identified the SaaS contract that he helped Twitter save money on as the design platform Figma and claimed his prioritization work related to “all active design projects.”
Musk responded with two laughing face emojis and tweeted a link to a clip from the comedy movie “Office Space,” which parodies office working culture. In the clip, two senior executives ask an employee, “What would you say you do here?”
Thorleifsson claimed that following the argument with Musk, Twitter’s head of human resources informed him that he had been fired. Musk criticized Thorleifsson’s performance at the company, saying he “did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.” Thorleifsson suffers from muscular dystrophy.
Musk has come under heavy fire as a result of the incident, with many people accusing him of being callous to employees with disabilities and trolling an employee that is actually very effective. Billy Markus, a supporter of Musk and the co-creator of dogecoin, disagreed with Musk’s tweets. Musk replied to Markus in a since-deleted message, “He’s the worst, sorry.”
Thorleifsson, a well-known designer from Iceland who previously won the country’s “person of the year” award, sold his design firm Ueno to Twitter in early 2021. Thorleifsson told BBC News: “I decided to sell for a few reasons but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely failing me. I have a few good work years left in me so this was a way to wrap up my company, and set up myself and my family for years when I won’t be able to do as much.”
The sale of Ueno to Twitter was done as an “acqui-hire” in which Twitter essentially purchased the agency that it already had a relationship with and hired its employees as part of its own design team. Thorleifsson had negotiated that the sale would be paid in wages in order to be taxed at Iceland’s higher rate of 46 percent instead of the 22 percent capital gains rate as he wanted to support the country’s disability assistance programs and “give back to the society which provided him with his education.”
Hours after the incident, Musk backtracked, claiming that he had a video call with Thorleifsson “to figure out what’s real vs what I was told” after a Twitter user claimed to have worked with Thorleifsson directly and found his work ethic to be “next level.”
Matt Monette, the U. and Ireland country lead at the human resources platform Deel, said that as tech layoffs increase and remote working becomes more common, there was a “greater need for effective internal communications.” Monette told CNBC: “If an employee is having to ask their boss via Twitter if they still have a job or not, something has clearly gone pretty wrong. Employers must make sure they abide by the rules in different countries.”
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan