Twitter Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Elon Musk has publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts.
Musk spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night.
Haraldur Thorleifsson, an Iceland-based Twitter senior director, tweeted at Musk that access to his computer had been cut off nine days earlier when Twitter reportedly laid off some 200 employees. But, Thorleifsson said in his tweet, “your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not.”
Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” he tweeted. In a separate tweet, the billionaire said Thorleifsson “did no actual work, claimed as an excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing.”
Thorleifsson clarified in a tweet that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that he says put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago.
Thorleifsson, who founded a digital branding company acquired by Twitter in 2021, has been recognized by the United Nations and the president of Iceland for spearheading a charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around Reykjavik to increase the city’s accessibility, CNN reports.
“I’m not able to do manual work (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for extended periods of time without my hands starting to cramp,” he said. “I can however write for an hour or two at a time. This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical advice.”
According to CNN, Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations department, also did not respond.
It’s not the first time Musk, one of the richest men in the world, has publicly mocked employees at Twitter, the company he bought for $44 billion last year. He has feuded on the platform with former Twitter executives, fired employees who criticized him and in one case publicly called out a former employee’s tweets about him saying that they were the result of “a tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s.”
Following the exchange with Musk, Thorleifsson said in a tweet that Twitter’s HR head had confirmed he is no longer employed at the company.
“Which is totally ok and it happens all the time … They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now,” he said. “Next up though is finding out if Twitter will pay me what they owe me per my contract.” (SaharaReporters)
