Elon Musk backpedals after mocking disabled Twitter worker in tweet ‘storm’

If you’re not told you are fired, are you really fired? At Twitter, probably.

Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work – only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others.

He might have figured, as others before him have in the chaotic months of layoffs and firings since Elon Musk took over the company, that he was out of a job.

Instead, after nine days of no answer from Twitter as to whether or not he was still employed, Thorleifsson decided to tweet at Musk to see if he could catch the billionaire’s attention and get an answer to his Schrödinger’s job situation.

“Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?” he wrote on Monday.

Eventually, he got his answer after a surreal Twitter exchange with Musk, who proceeded to quiz him about his work, question his disability and need for accommodations (Thorleifsson has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair) and tweet that Thorleifsson has a “prominent, active Twitter account and is wealthy” and the “reason he confronted me in public was to get a big payout”.

While the exchange was going on, Thorleifsson said he received an email that he was no longer employed.

On Tuesday evening, Musk tweeted an apology to Thorleifsson, saying his misunderstanding was “based on things I was told that were untrue”.

Thorleifsson, who lives in Iceland, has nearly 160,000 Twitter followers (Musk has over 130 million). He joined Twitter in 2021, when the company, under the prior management, acquired his startup Ueno.

He was lauded in Icelandic media for choosing to receive the purchase price in wages rather than a lump sum payout. That’s because this way, he would pay higher taxes to Iceland in support of its social services and safety net.

Thorleifsson tweeted to Musk that “The reason I asked you in public is because you (or anyone else at Twitter) didn’t reply to my private messages.”

“You had every right to lay me off. But it would have been nice to let me know!” he added.

Thorleifsson’s next move: “I’m opening a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik very soon,” he tweeted. “It’s named after my mom.”