Elon Musk has apologized after publicly mocking a disabled Twitter employee who wasn’t sure he had been fired by the company.
Musk questioned the professional performance of the former employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, and said that “I had hardly done any work in the last four months.”
Thorleifsson opened his work computer last Sunday and found that it no longer had a connection to corporate systems. Thorleifsson tweeted Musk said on Monday that he had not heard back from Twitter’s human resources department and that he was waiting for clarification on whether he was still employed by the company.
Dear @elonmusk
9 days ago my work computer was hacked, along with 200 other Twitter employees.
However, your HR manager cannot confirm whether I am an employee or not. You haven’t responded to my emails.
Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll reply here?
Musk responded in a tweet, asking “what work have you been doing?”. Thorleifsson responded with a list of his tasks, noting that he had saved the company $500,000 on a software-as-a-service contract, among other things.
Musk doubted his answers and replied “(put) pictures or it didn’t happen«. Musk he said that he was using his handicap, muscular dystrophy, as an excuse..
The reality is that this guy (who is rich in his own right) didn’t do any real work, claimed as an excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, but at the same time he tweeted nonstop.
I can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.
At the time of the exchange, Thorleifsson said he was informed that he no longer worked for the company.
Thorleifsson, who lives in Iceland, joined Twitter in 2021 when the social network acquired his startup Ueno. He was recognized by the United Nations for leading a charitable initiative to build 1,000 ramps around Reykjavik.
After facing the backlash, Musk changed his mind and qualified the situation as a “misunderstanding”.
I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of her situation. It was based on things I was told that were false or, in some cases, true but not meaningful.
He is considering following on Twitter.
This isn’t the first time Musk has publicly mocked Twitter employees. The question is whether it will be the last.
